Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Eye-opening fruit aromas, a firm structure and lively balance give this wine youthful energy at age 10. Brilliant red cherries, raspberries and beautiful spices like cinnamon and cloves on the palate. Great complexity, focus and freshness. Has aged gracefully and potentially has a long way to go.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Tasted alongside the 2015 Pinot Noir Sequitur from Ribbon Ridge, the 2015 Pinot Noir The Beaux Frères Vineyard has fantastic energy for this vintage, revealing sanguine notes of iron-rich earth, cranberries, bright spices, and dried flowers. It’s salty and focused on the palate, with a refreshing feel, chalky tannins, and a savory finish.
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Wine Spectator
Offers impressive presence and polish, with a multilayered, complex core wrapped in rich and expressive blueberry and cherry flavors. Drink now through 2025.
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.”
Ribbon Ridge is a regular span of uplifted, marine, sedimentary soils (called Willakenzie), whose highest ridge elevations twist like a ribbon. An early settler from Missouri named Colby Carter noticed this unique topography and gave the region its name in 1865—though it wasn’t declared its own AVA until 140 years later, in 2005. The AVA is enclosed by mountains on all sides between Yamhill-Carlton and the Chehalem Mountains, and is actually part of the larger Chehalem Mountains AVA. Its soils have a finer texture than its neighbors with parent materials composed of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone. Given its presence of natural aquifers in this five square mile area, most vineyards are actually easily dry farmed!