Each year we end our wine-making journey by curating The Optimist, where we bring together grape varieties that wouldn’t normally find themselves in the same bottle. There’s always a bit of positive thinking involved—hence the name—but the result is a unique wine you won’t find anywhere else. In 2015, we wedded nine parts Malbec from sunny Southern Oregon to one part Viognier from the Columbia Gorge. It’s a technique we borrowed from French winemakers in Côte-Rôtie where they mix Viognier into Syrah to keep its color. The 2015 Optimist is a smooth, velvety Malbec with notes of rich blue fruits, along with a floral, perfumy element. Less tannic than South American Malbecs, you can pair it with much more than red meat.

The Bramble Rosé takes its name from our wine bar and tasting room, which is housed in a historic hundred-year-old building that we meticulously refurbished in 2015. Like that building, this Rosé has a bit of age on it. At Silas we give our Rosés more skin contact up front and ample time to settle, especially when working from tannic red grapes. This helps us achieve a complexity otherwise absent in many younger Rosés. The 2016 Bramble Rosé has notes of cherry jam, stone fruit, and dried dianthus. With more weight than a mere summer wine, the Bramble Rosé is a year-round companion that leaves a lasting impression with a surprisingly long finish.

The Pinot for the people. Like the city it is named after, our PDX Pinot is a diverse and dynamic blend that finds harmony in excess. We use fruit from each of our vineyards to capture the essence of the Willamette Valley in that particular vintage. In a way, PDX is our Northstar Pinot, which we intentionally keep at a reasonable price point, so that even those friends eating ramen on a Tuesday night have a great wine to pair with it. In 2015 the weather was hot, which resulted in a fuller-bodied, musky Pinot with a heavier cherry nose, but because of our high elevation grapes, it still retains some jammy red fruit and berry skin tartness.

The Pearl is our yearly barrel select Pinot. It takes its name from a once-shabby-now-chic neighborhood in Portland. Shabby because we start with the two most interesting, non-conformist barrels of each vintage—our black sheep—and chic because we layer on top a selection of the vintage’s most elegant, complimentary barrels. The result is a Pinot that highlights the most distinctive elements of each vintage. In 2014 our non-conformist barrels added a mulled wine element (clove, allspice, black pepper) that we harmonized with strong black cherry notes to create a Pinot with a long finish. A rich, deep-hued wine for a cozy winter evening.

Enna Hay is quite the catch. A mercurial white wine that changes varietals, depending on the vintage, Enna Hay’s uniqueness begins on the vines. For the Pinot Blanc, we concentrate the berries by not cropping them regularly, then allow the wine to ferment for 18 months in neutral oak and stir the lees regularly to build extra body. The 2016 vintage is a dry Pinot Blanc with citrus flower on the nose, notes of beeswax, and a slightly tart Granny Smith finish. Perhaps because of her strong floral notes, Enna Hay is a favorite of those who prefer sweeter wines, though she’d never deign to be called saccharine.

Named after the historic Portland neighborhood with a European village vibe—where the streets converge at angles, gardens appear from nooks and crannies, and drivers get lost in roundabouts—the Ladd’s Addition is what we imagine a winemaker from Burgundy might do with an Oregon Pinot Noir. The 2015 Ladd’s Addition carries a hint of cherry cola along with brambly red fruit that comes from using whole clusters of grapes. A foresty, old world Pinot, it is like that French exchange student who made your humdrum high school more interesting and worldly—even if just for a year.