Windfall Vineyard’s first wines are here!
Three inaugural bottlings from a site that Director of Winemaking Isabelle Meunier and founder Andy Lytle planted with a singular purpose: to showcase what the western edge of the Eola-Amity Hills, fully exposed to the Van Duzer Corridor, could produce when given exactly the right varieties, clones, and attention. The result gives voice to three distinct expressions across the same 55 acres at Windfall: a Chardonnay that reads the site’s temperament with crystalline precision, a Pinot Noir that draws on the full range of its blocks and clones, and L’Élu — a single-block Pinot Noir of rare concentration and conviction. The vineyard also contributes to the Lytle-Barnett sparkling program, where its fruit finds yet another dimension of expression. Each wine begins at the same site, shaped by the same Van Duzer winds, harvested from the same vines. What separates them is not place, but perspective.
Chardonnay may be the most transparent measure of a vineyard’s temperament, and at Windfall, the reading is unambiguous: tension, minerality, and an exacting natural acidity. Director of Winemaking Isabelle Meunier draws the wine from Dijon 76 and Dijon 96, fermented with native yeasts and carried through complete malolactic conversion that rounds it into something at once vibrant and seamless. Aged with minimal new oak, it is restrained in its winemaking but expansive in its expression: exotic citrus, white peach, and yellow florals over a foundation of oyster shell and wet slate, resolving into a saline, mineral-driven finish of uncommon length. It is a small-production Chardonnay that needs no qualifier — this is what Windfall is.
If the Chardonnay is Windfall’s opening statement, the Pinot Noir is the full conversation. Drawn from blocks across the site, each contributing a distinct voice, this is the wine that maps the vineyard’s range. One brings structure and earthy depth. Another, aromatic lift—blueberry, lavender, rosemary. A third, generosity and spice. Together they compose a Pinot Noir that is both energetic and broad, detailed and approachable.
Isabelle Meunier harvests across multiple picks, allowing each block to reach its own point of equilibrium. Native fermentation and full indigenous malolactic conversion let the site speak without further interpretation; new oak provides frame without imposition. The result is a wine of genuine breadth—bright marionberry and baking spice expanding across a full mid-palate, settling into a wide, savory finish with gentle salinity and supple tannins. The most generous of the Windfall bottlings, and perhaps the most immediately inviting.
L’Élu—”the chosen one”—is not a name the wine was given lightly. Block 20, designated the Mélange block, was planted to a diversity of Pinot Noir clones hand-selected by Andy and Isabelle, each chosen for its distinct contribution to depth and complexity in both fruit and finished wine. Situated in the southwest quadrant of Windfall Vineyard, the block drinks in the longest light of the day and bears the full weight of the valley’s prevailing winds—conditions that concentrate and define. Where the Windfall Pinot Noir draws from selected voices across the vineyard, L’Élu finds that same range within a single block — every clone present, every influence accounted for.
The wine is a study in contrasts: wild blackberry and marionberry set against the brooding depth of forest floor, dried shiitake, and charcuterie, with wet stone and persimmon anchoring it all. Tense and vibrant on entry, the wine broadens across a structured mid-palate of dark fruit, dried tobacco, cocoa, and baking spice before tightening into a mineral-driven finish of powerful length. Refined yet dense tannins carry every element to the end without releasing any of them prematurely.
L’Élu is the most limited wine in the Aubaine portfolio—and its most singular argument for what Windfall Vineyard can produce. Every detail is deliberate. Every decision, earned. It is a wine of precise conviction.
Windfall was planted to serve more than one ambition. Among the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that anchor the Aubaine portfolio, the vineyard also holds Pinot Meunier — the grape Champagne has long relied on for body, fruit, and generosity — planted here with intention, for sparkling wine, from the start. From Windfall, that Meunier enters the Lytle-Barnett sparkling program in the hands of Director of Winemaking Andrew Davis, where it brings depth and approachability to the estate’s Method Oregon cuvées. Method Oregon is a designation co-pioneered by Lytle-Barnett and a growing community of Oregon producers committed to the rigor of traditional method sparkling wines made entirely from Oregon-grown fruit — the same labor-intensive process as Champagne, rooted entirely in this place.
At Windfall, sparkling is no secondary purpose. It is written into the planting itself — a vineyard conceived to give as fully to the bottle’s pressure as to its stillness. In Le Mélangeur, that intention stands entirely on its own: a 100% Pinot Meunier expression of the Method Oregon standard, and the rare bottling in which a grape known for what it lends others speaks for itself. A vineyard asked to do more than one thing can dilute itself, or it can flourish. Windfall flourishes.