History
Vines went into Deer Meadows in 1986, on a 40-acre property in the hills northeast of Boonville belonging to Rich Savoy, the same grower who planted Savoy Vineyard down on the valley floor. Lemon's first vintage, in 1993, produced 150 cases of One Acre Pinot Noir alongside a Mays Canyon Chardonnay, the two wines that launched the label. Paying by the acre was a genuine bet at the time, when Anderson Valley Pinot Noir was fetching something near $800 a ton and going largely into sparkling wine, and Lemon has since described the arrangement as the longest-running per-acre grape contract in California. Phylloxera forced a replant in 2005 that changed rootstock, row orientation and clones together, and the declassified young-vine fruit off that replant became Les Larmes, the tears, a cuvee Littorai still makes. Lemon raised the idea of buying in 2007, let it lie through the recession, and wrote to Savoy again in 2015; the sale closed in 2016, with 2017 the first vintage under Littorai's ownership.
The Site
The vineyard sits on a hilltop at 1,600 feet, among the highest ground Littorai farms, though The Return, carved out of the same property, runs higher still toward 1,750 feet, and Lemon has put the top of the hill in conversation nearer 2,000. The land is gently rolling rather than steep and lies open to the northwest wind, on Bearwallow loam over marine sandstone. Altitude and wind together push the harvest very late: Lemon reckons the site roughly three weeks behind Ferrington on the valley floor, and it is often the last parcel the winery picks. Crops are correspondingly small, and the ten-year average yield is 2.40 tons per acre.
Vines and Blocks
The planting is Pinot Noir and nothing else. Of the 8.5 planted acres at Deer Meadows, three carry One Acre; two more at the top of the property, steeper, westerly and on a different soil, were separated out as The Return from 2017; and the remaining 3.5 go into Les Larmes. The rows feeding One Acre migrated across that three-acre pool during the contract years, as Savoy pushed Lemon to try new material. Published selections run to Wadenswil 2A, Dijon 114, 115, 667 and 777, a faux 828 and Swan, where the estate's own note gives the shorter set of 114, 777, 828 and Swan. Pruning is double Guyot without replacement spurs, farming uses organic materials and biodynamic method without certification, and sheep reached the Anderson Valley sites in 2023.
The Wines
Littorai bottles the site alone and in tiny quantity, since the vintages that publish a figure sit near 150 cases, 140 in 2004 and 143 in 2013. Ferments are native-yeast with roughly a quarter to two fifths whole cluster, and the wine spends fourteen to seventeen months in French oak from Jacques Damy in Meursault, a fifth to a quarter of it new, finishing around 13 percent alcohol. Lemon places One Acre at the generous end of his Anderson Valley range, against the tannin and angles of Cerise, with The Return softer still.