Winemaker Notes
Fresh strawberry and cherry aromas and flavors are everywhere, and impossible to resist. It's that kind of juice, similar to the Old Vines, that's pure, fresh, silky, and sexy.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale ruby, the 2017 Pinot Noir Dundee Hills opens with woodsmoke, crushed pink peppercorn, garrigue, dusty earth and dried leaves aromas with notes of cranberries, wild blackberries, red berries and a framing of cinnamon spice. It’s light-bodied and elegantly styled with spicy fruits, a soft frame and juicy freshness, finishing long.
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Wine Spectator
Poised and elegantly complex, with delicate cherry, violet and orange peel notes that dance on a lithe finish. Drink now through 2024.
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.