Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Satiny and multilayered, with floral raspberry and pomegranate flavors that are laced with fresh violet and toasty spice notes. Drink now through 2029.
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James Suckling
Pretty aromas of dried violets, fresh cherries, plum stones and nutmeg. It’s medium-bodied with fine, powdery tannins and fresh acidity. Sleek and refined. Elegant finish. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
This pings the palate with cola and black cherry flavors, along with minerally acidity that buoys up rather than tarts up the palate. It's lighter than the previous vintage, balanced and appealing, with that streak of cola lingering on through the medium length finish.
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Wine & Spirits
This wine typically shows a spicy warmth, as it does in 2019—brambly and rich, with horehound, cherry and violet blossom scents giving way to a generous texture. It’s round and mouth-filling, quite irresistible, for something with wild mushrooms.
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.