Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2006 Pinot Noir Reserve is medium ruby-colored. Its superb bouquet is already complex with notes of spice box, earth notes, cherry, and raspberry. This leads to a smooth textured, elegant, ripe wine with vibrant acidity for the vintage and excellent overall balance. Drink this outstanding effort over the next eight years.
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Wine Enthusiast
The most successful 2006 Pinot in Argyle’s lineup, this wine bursts with cherries, dusty caramel and seductive aromas of rose petals, scattered across the palate. It’s full-flavored yet retains its Pinot character, with poise and tension into the sweet, fruity finish.
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Wine Spectator
Open-textured, with a welcome transparency to the blackberry, currant and plum fruit and the shadings of star anise and black pepper. The finish sails on with minimal impediment from tannins. Drink now through 2014. 6,450 cases made.
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.