L'USINE

Dave Phinney (yes, the same Dave Phinney you just read about in the piece on Orin Swift), well, he gets around. He's obviously capable of multi-tasking, because l'usine is his outfit too, but he also gets around in order to hunt down vineyard locations that allow him to pursue his winemaking goal of achieving complexity through geographic diversity. L'usine translates as 'the factory', a tip of the hat to Andy Warhol's famous studio. In Dave Phinney's words: 'Wine, like art, is raw. It requires years of hard work. It has a high likelihood to fail. It is subjective at best. It isn’t always pretty. Like art, for every good or great wine that is made there have been thousands of failures.' Making Pinot Noir is the pursuit that created l'usine. The resulting three wines are the culmination of a search for the best sites in the vintage. All three are barrel selections of each vineyard that added the most complexity to the final wine, with each barrel tasted completely blind and selected for their sense of place and their intricacy.