A Wine That Doesn’t Age, and You Shouldn’t Let It

The Marigny Pinot Noir Carbonic Maceration, 2024

Bottle image courtesy of The Marigny Wines

The Marigny Pinot Noir Carbonic Maceration
Varietal: Pinot Noir
Region: Willamette Valley, Oregon
Year: 2024
Price: $29
Available from The Marigny

I have an interesting relationship with time. There’s part of me that watches each passing minute like it owes me money, and another part that still feels quietly embarrassed when my brain thinks of 2019 as “last year.” I rarely know what day of the week it is, and there’s only one hour between 10PM and 4AM, but I always call the restaurant to let them know we’re running two minutes behind. The phrase “long days, fast years” comes to mind, but it’s something else, more like “long emails, fast decades.” Time is something I’ve always felt I’ve had too much of or never enough.

Wine always transcended that for me, though. Vintage year, whatever, didn’t matter. It could be from last year or it could be from 1991—what mattered was where it took me. One bottle might drop me into a dusty sunroom with a teak bar cart and a hi-fi playing Getz. Another might shove me into the booth of a fake Italian restaurant in Pasadena, surrounded by people in linen who all somehow know each other. Wine was never about when it was made. It was about where it landed.

And then I opened The Marigny’s 2024 Pinot Noir Carbonic Maceration—its tenth anniversary vintage. How could I not think about the actual passage of time?

I’ve been drinking Andrew Young’s wines for ten fucking years. His St. Reginald Parish 2013 Pinot Noirs were some of the first samples I was ever sent—probably the first natural wine samples I received—early in my writing career, before “wine writer” felt like a title I’d earned, but after I already knew what carbonic maceration was. Which made them even more exciting. I understood what he was doing, yet still hadn’t tasted many carbonic Pinots from Oregon. They were precise, lifted and clean, but with grit. Honest but not performative.

I drank them but never formally wrote about them (a theme with many wines throughout my career). But it wasn’t because they weren’t worth writing about. It was because the wine was just present. Bottles I opened without hesitation. Glasses I refilled before the last sip had even disappeared. For years, The Marigny Pinot Noir Carbonic lived in my life in real time. Not to take me somewhere else, but to anchor me where I was.

For sneaking into Feast Portland parties.
For chugging on IG Stories in bikinis.
For nights when I wanted something fun
and didn’t want to explain why.

This wine has changed over the years, of course. But the core of it remains the same: juicy, consistent, raspberry soda energy. It’s meant to be drunk for fun. For fucking now.

Think wild berries smashed on cold stone, a whiff of tomato leaf if you’re paying attention, and that tart snap of cherry-lime punch. There’s a little volatile lift at the top but it never tips too far. The fruit’s ripe, but not messy. You get energy, but not chaos. It tastes like a good mood with a backbone.

The 2024 has a little more grip than it used to. A little more edge. Like someone who still knows how to dance on tables, but also brings a coat because they know they’ll be cold later. There’s structure here. A coolness. A confidence. The kind that comes from not needing to prove anything—just being really fucking good at what you do.

And maybe that’s what’s always made this wine special. It’s never asked to be anything other than what it is. Never begged to be aged. Never positioned itself as the bottle to define a generation. It’s not here for legacy. It’s here for you.

This wine isn’t meant to be given
a specific place in time—
except the place it is with you,
right now.

So drink it.
Chug it.
Pair it with oysters, or pizza, or nothing at all.
Let it be what it’s always been:
Fucking fun. For fucking now.
And for the next ten years, too.

As for my own passage of time,
I can only hope for the same. 💋

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Extra Notes: Organically farmed, hand-harvested, whole-cluster, native yeast. Fermented carbonically in stainless steel, bottled unfiltered. Holds up beautifully in the fridge, still tasting like summer with a spine.

Ross Test: DUH. DO IT! DO IT!

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All collages © Marissa A. Ross. Hand-cut and original compositions. Please do not reproduce without permission. (Bottle image courtesy of The Marigny Wines.)