Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Remarkably and seamlessly complex, with a polished and refined core wrapped in silky raspberry and blueberry flavors, accented by savory spice and orange zest hints. The long finish builds toward polished tannins. Drink now through 2025. From Oregon.
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Jeb Dunnuck
From the estate vineyard in the Ribbon Ridge AVA in Oregon, the 2016 Pinot Noir The Beaux Frères Vineyard sports a translucent ruby hue as well as a classic Burgundian bouquet of dried cherries, mulberries, forest floor, baking spices, and flowery incense notes. This carries to a medium-bodied 2016 that has an elegant, silky texture, beautiful balance between its fruit, acidity, and tannins, and a great finish. This wonderfully complex, nuanced, elegant Pinot Noir will evolve for a solid decade.
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!