Winemaker Notes
#5 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
Arterberry Maresh Maresh Vineyard Pinot Noir comes from high elevation vines planted in 1970 and 1972. Classic Dundee Hills high toned red fruits and florals emerge with air. Elegant and coiled with raspberry, boysenberry and old vine minerality that adds layers to the fruit as it hits full stride in perfect balance.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Tense and savory, with layers of spicy herbs and black pepper, together with pure, elegant fruit wrapped in blood-orange zest. The structure is tightly wound, with firm, deeply rooted tannins and almost endless length. The mid-palate unfolds with bitter oranges, seashells, iron and crushed bricks, adding complexity. This is built for the cellar and needs some time.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Maresh Vineyard is impossible to ignore, offering an array of crushed cherries and minty herbs, along with a hint of clove and stone dust that tempt the senses. Elegance defines the feel, as velvety textures are supported by cool-toned acidity while red and blue fruits swirl across the palate, leaving a crunchy mineral tinge toward the close. A web of fine-grained tannins adds structure and poise as the 2023 finishes with outstanding length and energy, leaving inner rose tones and a pleasantly bitter twang to linger. Fabulous.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pinot Noir Maresh Vineyard is bursting with cranberry, Italian plum, lilac, shiitake mushroom, tobacco and forest floor aromas, offering additional details with each return to the glass. Medium-bodied, it floods the mouth with layers of ripe fruit, earth and spice. It’s framed by dusty tannins and mouthwatering acidity and has a long, spicy finish.
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Wine Spectator
Deeply structured and detailed, with handsome flavors of raspberry, cherry, toasted spices and black tea that gather richness and tension on the finish.
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.