Winemaker Notes
On the nose, cherry, cola, spicebox, vanilla and fig. The palate is silky, smooth, vibrant and creamy.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Such sweet aromas of cherries and plums with bright, vanilla spices that lead to a palate that offers an impressively elegant yet flavorful brand of pinot. Smooth, defined and even.
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Wine Enthusiast
The estate vineyard is in fine form here, yielding an instantly agreeable wine with upfront highlights of barrel toast, smoke and tobacco framing rich black cherry fruit. It's full bodied all the way through the finish, which wraps up with black tea tannins. Drink now through the late 2020s.
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Wine Spectator
Precise and tightly focused, with a backbone of vibrant acidity wrapped in dynamic cherry, pomegranate and dark tea flavors that persist toward refined tannins. Drink now through 2026.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.