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Our 2020 letter to wiseacre members:

We hope this letter finds you cozily in your homes, maybe making a fire as the weather gets cooler, catching up on episodes of Great British Bake Off, eating that cake you tried to copy from the show but surprise, surprise: you’ve accidentally used sour cream in place of cream cheese for the icing. We’ve all been there. Just add it to the long list of ways that 2020 has tried to doom us but we know you’re iron-willed, you eat that sour cream-frosted disaster and you enjoy it. At the very least, we’re hoping this package of our 2019 Wiseacre wines can transport you back to a simpler time.

2020 in the wine industry seems to have mirrored the world at large: we’ve taken some lumps too. But what better way to test our winemaking prowess than to make wine amidst a pandemic and historic fires. If you follow the industry, we suspect you’ll be hearing a lot about the fires and how they’ll affect the vintage but we have a lot of room for optimism. The growing season this year was shaping up to be one for the books -- compact clusters, fewer clusters per vine, impactful flavors from small berries. Drew mentioned around verasion that this was looking a lot like a classic Oregon vintage, unlike the previous years starting in 2014 that were hot, ripe, and plentiful. And then came the fires and almost as worse, the people who said they knew how the fires were going to affect the wines. The wine coming out of our fermenters this harvest have been highly complex and maybe some of the best wines we’ve made (looking at you ‘20 Filament). We remain very excited and you’ll of course be hearing more about these wines in next year’s Wiseacre letter.

First, here is what you are going to find in your Wiseacre package (2 bottles of each wine listed below):

  • 2019 Strandline Pinot Noir

  • 2019 Bieze Pinot Noir

  • 2019 Filament Pinot Noir

  • 2019 Antiquum Pinot Noir

  • 2019 Bramble Hill Pinot Noir

  • 2019 Wiseacre Selection Pinot Noir


If you received last year’s letter, you may remember that the 2019 growing season was slightly different from the previous five vintages as we saw a cooler spring, fewer heat spikes, and more prominent rain events during the harvest months. Cassidy, the newest Harper Voit team member extraordinaire, wanted me to tell everyone that the spiders that migrated on the fruit to our sorting table in 2019 were exceptionally large and terrifying as well. With rain and cooler temperatures in September, we spent a few more hours at the sorting table pulling fruit but luckily, the grapes were surprisingly resilient despite the conditions. In many ways, the rain and cooler days helped with slow sugar accumulation and made for more mosaic phenolic development. 

These six wines in your shipment may be divisive if you found yourself getting used to Oregon pinot from 2014 onward. However we find these wines to be distinctive in their floral tones and we are particularly engaged in how those floral tones interact with the spice all of our single vineyards tend to imbue. So while Oregon has seen a run of opulent, fruit-driven pinot in the previous years, you’ll find that our 2019’s are expressive in a much different way. 2014-2018 were the Heath Ledger 10 Things I Hate About You wines and the 2019’s are the Health Ledger a la Brokeback Mountain -- all handsome wines but nonetheless divergent.

And finally, your Wiseacre exclusive bottles, the 2019 Wiseacre Selection Pinot Noir, is a  single-barrel selection that is only available to you and was our best barrel of the vintage. In 2019, that barrel was part of a Bieze Vineyard lot made from an heirloom clone and includes 24% whole cluster. 

You’ll be happy to know that we’re immensely proud of these wines. You’ll also be happy to know an inordinate amount of burritos were harmed in the making of these wines, a copious amount of Narragansett beer was drank, and Nate, exhausted from a day’s work but still waiting for more fruit in the winery parking lot at 9 PM, won a grueling push-up contest against harvest intern, Joe, and remains undefeated to this day. Neither Jess nor Drew acknowledge this fact. Of course, all of that is to say we hope you enjoy these wines the same way we enjoyed making them.


Cheers from your Harper Voit Team,

Drew, Jess, Nate, & Cassidy (AKA Sassidy)