Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir Arcus Vineyard is bursting with layered, fragrant scents of rhubarb, red berry preserves, hibiscus and bergamot. The medium-bodied palate is silky and vibrant. It's bursting with bitters-laced fruit, and it has a very long, nuanced finish. It unfurls dramatically over several minutes in the glass and will benefit from 3-5 years in the cellar.
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Wine Spectator
Well-knit and loaded with tension, with multilayered cranberry and cherry flavors accented by stony mineral and spiced tea notes. Finishes with broad-shouldered tannins. Best from 2026 through 2033.
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.