Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Attractive, bright and ripe, darker cherries here with freshness that really appeals on the palate. Clarity, cut and detail with black-cherry flavors.
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Wine Enthusiast
Full throttle fruit, wide open with big flavors of black cherry, this red easily carries the barrel highlights (41% new French oak) and herbal components from 40% whole-cluster fermentation. Streaks of coffee, dark chocolate and wet bark roll through polished tannins. This seems bound to improve over the next decade and longer.
Editors' Choice -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple in color, the 2016 Pinot Noir Arcus Vineyard has a perfumed nose of pink peppercorn, fresh pipe tobacco, dried leaves, violets and dusty crushed rock over a core of crushed blueberries and black cherries with bramble berry preserves in the background. Medium-bodied and silky textured, it fills the mouth with blue and black fruits with great layers of exotic spices and earth. It has a firm frame of chewy tannins and mouthwatering acidity, finishing very long and layered.
Rating: 92+ -
Wine Spectator
Well-built and generous, with cherry and pomegranate flavors accented by orange peel and rose petal notes. Drink now through 2024.
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Decanter
An exquisite fine blend of cherry and currant fruit, raspberry, strawberry, cinnamon Christmas spice, bourbon and strong oak spices. A savoury roasted nut and coffee aroma complete the pleasure.
In 1993, Archery Summit set its sights on creating wines of real purpose in the Willamette Valley. Since then, the Dundee Hills winery has helped establish the region as the cradle of cooler-climate American wine. Winemaker Kim Abrahams and her team achieve bar-raising wines through hard-won instincts—the familiarity gained from many shared vintages and from tending vineyard sites they know intimately.
As responsible stewards of the land, Archery Summit engages in minimal-impact agriculture. Sustainability is a dynamic and vital part of growing wine—a practice that ensures both the industry’s future and the overall health of the trade. They practice sustainability wherever possible, from responsible farming in the vineyard to energy-sensitive approaches in the cellar.
Many of the vineyard sites are LIVE (Low Input Viticulture & Enology) certified, meaning they adhere to an internationally-acclaimed set of sustainability standards. These guidelines are site-specific and focus on strengthening the well-being of the vineyard through minimal spraying, careful clone selection, heightened biodiversity, and more. Archery Summit is committed to ensuring that the soils and biodiversity of each site remain as healthy and vibrant as when they first began cultivating them.
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.