Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Adelsheim’s single vineyards were planted in the early 2000s on very steep slopes at 485 to 625 feet elevation. The bright red 2022 Pinot Noir Boulder Bluff Vineyard has a fruity and floral profile with notes of candied raspberries, pressed flowers, sweet herbs, and fresh soil. It takes on more tension on the palate, with finely coiled tannins, juicy, ripe fruit, mouthwatering, fresh acidity, and a long feel throughout the finish. It’s focused and has a good, compact, yet elegant feel. Drink 2025-2037.
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James Suckling
An intense, structured, powerful and full-bodied wine with black and red fruit, cedar and bitter chocolate.An intense, structured, powerful and full-bodied wine with black and red fruit, cedar and bitter chocolate.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir Boulder Bluff is supple and inviting. Matured for 10 months in 33% new French oak, it opens with wafts of iodine and woodsmoke that give way to wild berry fruit and accents of rose petal and tangerine. Medium-bodied, it offers layer after layer of red fruit, citrus and spice. It’s structured by finely chalky tannins and mouthwatering acidity and has a long, layered finish.
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Wine Spectator
Precise and tightly focused, with cherry and pomegranate flavors that take on orange peel, dusky spice and black tea accents as this finishes with refined tannins.
Established in 1971, Adelsheim is a family-owned and operated winery with estate vineyards located in Oregon's northern Willamette Valley. Over the past 41 years, the Adelsheim Vineyard estate has grown to include twelve exception vineyard sites throughout the Valley, totaling 237 acres. Company co-founder, David Adelsheim, has done work throughout the years to benefit both the Oregon and American wine industries: grape and wine research, wine labeling, industry education, and promotion. He is recognized for his "outstanding service" to the industry and has played a vital role in building the Oregon wine industry and establishing its reputation worldwide. Today, he leads a current generation of passionate staff devoted to leading the industry in crafting consistently transcendent wines.
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.”
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.