Winemaker Notes
A classically Eola-Amity Hills blend telling the perfect story of our estate vineyards in this AVA, this Nuthouse Pinot Noir is brooding with crunchy cassis and deep black raspberry notes. Its mouthwatering acidity mellows the textured tannins and adds a layer of depth, personality and longevity.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This handsome, brooding Pinot offers multilayered raspberry and cherry flavors highlighted by spiced cinnamon and sandalwood notes before finishing with medium-grained tannins.
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Decanter
Classic notes from the Eola-Amity Hills with loads of depth and texture. Aromatics of turned earth, Christmas spice and ripe black fruit. The palate emphasises the wine's savoury character with notes of soy, and dried thyme, transitioning to blackberries and Mission figs, amply textured with fine tannins and a mineral finish.
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Vinous
The 2021 Pinot Noir Nuthouse is exotic in the glass, with cascading florals and foreign spices complicating dried strawberries. This soothes with its juicy textures and ripe red and blue fruits as a core of juicy acidity adds a lovely inner freshness, and sweet herbs amass toward the close. Chalky minerals linger as the mouth waters for more and gentle grippy tannins add youthful poise. Very nice.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a lighter-bodied pinot experience, with a smooth, clean mouthfeel flanked by velvety tannins and citrusy acidity. Dark chocolate and sweet cherry aromas create an impression that you are about to inhale a slice of red velvet cake. The wine's cherry tart and sweet tea flavors only increase the hunger pangs.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.