Brick House Evelyn's Pinot Noir 2017
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Wine
Enthusiast -
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Robert
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James
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Product Details
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Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
This reserve wine is a best barrel selection of approximately 50% Pommard clone and 50% Dijon clone Pinot from the two main blocks of the estate vineyard. Fermented the same way as the Dijonnais and Tonnelier, the wine saw 18 months in approximately 45% new French oak cooperage. It is bottled by hand.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Evelyn's is the estate's reserve-level, best barrel selection. It's an all-senses potpourri with aromas of berry, sassafras and cinnamon, plus ripe fruit flavors of strawberry, marionberry and plum. More highlights continue with sassafras, coffee and baking spices. It's a riot of mixed and delicious components, beautifully balanced, and showing exceptional length and detail.
Editors' Choice -
Wine Spectator
Graceful and nuanced, with lovely aromas of violet and raspberry, leading to elegant tiers of cherry and spice that gather tension toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2027.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Evelyn's comes from about half Pommard and half Dijon clone fruit and was aged in about 40% new oak. Pale ruby-purple, it opens with some tarry/scorched earth aromas, unwinding slowly to red and black cherries and sweet red berry fruits with nuances of violets and amaro. The light to medium-bodied palate is firm, grainy and fresh with a long, flavorful finish. Give this another couple of years in bottle.
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James Suckling
This offers plenty of meaty spices and dark cherries that follow through to the palate in deliciously juicy, fully expressive mode. The tannins are sweeping and fall neatly around the long, expressive finish. Drink or hold.
Other Vintages
2015-
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Wine &
Spirits
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Wine
Enthusiast -
Wine
Spectator -
James
Suckling -
Robert
Parker
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Ribbon Ridge is a regular span of uplifted, marine, sedimentary soils (called Willakenzie), whose highest ridge elevations twist like a ribbon. An early settler from Missouri named Colby Carter noticed this unique topography and gave the region its name in 1865—though it wasn’t declared its own AVA until 140 years later, in 2005. The AVA is enclosed by mountains on all sides between Yamhill-Carlton and the Chehalem Mountains, and is actually part of the larger Chehalem Mountains AVA. Its soils have a finer texture than its neighbors with parent materials composed of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone. Given its presence of natural aquifers in this five square mile area, most vineyards are actually easily dry farmed!