Winemaker Notes
The 2021 wine is full of classic features: ripe, dark cherry skins, orange zest, and subtle white flower and miso notes.
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Layered and graceful, the 2021 Pinot Noir The Beaux Freres Vineyard pours a ripe ruby hue and reveals a beautiful perfume of orange rind, fresh red plum, clove spice, and rocky earth. Medium-bodied, with tremendous energy, fine tannins, a mineral texture, and a great, lightly toasty finish, it’s a gorgeous wine to drink over the next 10-12 years. Absolutely beautiful.
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James Suckling
Complex aromas of cherry stones, bramble berries, licorice, cardamom, bark and some potpourri. Salty olive undertones, too. It’s medium-bodied, tight and refined, with very fine tannins. Savory. Somewhat restrained for now. Unfined and unfiltered. Drink from 2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple, the 2021 Pinot Noir The Beaux Frères Vineyard opens slowly on the nose to a core of wild blackberry and blueberry, revealing tones of forest floor, licorice, bitters and floral potpourri as it spends time in the glass. The light-bodied palate is soft and juicy with surprisingly concentrated flavors for its delicate frame, and it has a long, floral finish. This is elegant, expressive and easy to drink! Rating: 95+
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Wine Spectator
Dynamic and expressive, with fragrant violet and raspberry aromas that highlight spirited guava, white pepper and spiced tea flavors, which build toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2033.
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!