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 in 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. Each wine begins at the same site, shaped by the same Van Duzer winds, harvested from the same young 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 electric acidity that belies the vineyard’s youth. For the debut Chardonnay, Winemaker Isabelle Meunier selected fruit from two blocks—Dijon 76 and Dijon 96—harvested at a lean 21.7 Brix with bracing natural acidity. Fermented with native yeasts and aged with minimal new oak influence, the wine 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 declaration of what Windfall’s Chardonnay will become—and what it already is.
If the Chardonnay is Windfall’s opening statement, the Pinot Noir is the full conversation. Drawn from three blocks—Pommard, Dijon 115, and Dijon 667—each contributing a distinct voice, this is the wine that maps the vineyard’s range. Pommard delivers structure and earthy depth. Dijon 115 brings aromatic lift—blueberry, lavender, rosemary. Dijon 667 rounds the blend with 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 mediation; 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. Where the Windfall Pinot Noir is a panoramic view of the vineyard, L’Élu is the close-up—denser, darker, more interior.
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 arguably its most singular argument for what Windfall Vineyard is capable of producing. Every detail is deliberate. Every decision, earned. It is a wine of precise conviction.
Windfall was planted to serve more than one ambition. Alongside the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that define the Aubaine portfolio, the vineyard is home to Pinot Meunier — the grape Champagne has long relied on for body, fruit, and generosity in its blends. Director of Winemaking Andrew Davis brings Windfall’s Meunier into the Lytle-Barnett sparkling program, where it contributes depth and approachability to the estate’s traditional method cuvées — and, in our upcoming Le Mélangeur bottling, stands entirely on its own as a 100% Pinot Meunier sparkling wine.
It is, in many ways, the quiet completion of what Windfall was designed to be: a single site capable of contributing to every dimension of what Lytle-Barnett and Aubaine produce.