Winemaker Notes
#14 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2021
An outlier within the famous sub-region of the Dundee Hills AVA. This unique expression Oregon Pinot Noir comes from one of the Willamette Valley's most respected vineyards.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The estate vineyard delivers the goods in this new vintage. A deep, dense purple-blue wine, it's packed with plum and blueberry fruit, along with sweet touches of maraschino cherries. Barrel aging laces the finish with coffee and cream. It's a sexy, irresistible young wine.
Editors' Choice -
Wine Spectator
This vibrant red is coiled with tension, offering dynamic raspberry and blueberry flavors that gather notes of spiced cinnamon and orange oil, building toward medium-grained tannins.
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.