Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Sleekly structured, with simmering intensity at the core, this red serves up lovely rose petal, raspberry and pomegranate flavors laced with earthy minerality. Builds toward refined tannins. Drink now through 2032. 1,890 cases made.
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James Suckling
This is spiced and a little toasty with a mix of red and dark fruit, bark, licorice and some earthy undertones. Medium-bodied. Crunchy and lightly chewy with fine tannins and juicy acidity. Bright and flavorful finish.
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.