Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
From a vineyard located in a natural amphitheater, the 2019 Pinot Noir Bergstrom Vineyard is fragrant of cranberry preserve, iron rich earth, and baking spice. The palate is full-bodied, with notes of turned earth, dried cherry, and crushed flowers and a long, persistent finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby, the 2019 Pinot Noir Bergström Vineyard has an alluring wild quality, with scents of wild blackberries, smoked meats and aniseed, and it has a savory, seamless feel in the mouth, balancing perfumed berry fruits with meaty notes on the long finish.
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James Suckling
Floral, earthy, red and blue fruit, in the cherry and plum zone. This has power and a broad spectrum of aromas and flavors with a lot to offer. Fine and resolved tannins and a smooth build into the long,defined finish. Plenty of flavor here. Holds well. Good aging potential. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
Combines brooding depth with handsome black cherry and plum flavors, which draw in black tea and spice box accents. Drink now through 2029.
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Wine Enthusiast
The original estate vineyard is now 20 years old and the vines should be entering full maturity. The resulting wine blends brambly blackberry fruit with savory flavors of mixed herbs. In this vintage, the alcohol is rather low and the wine is not as powerful as usual. Nonetheless, it's complete, balanced, textural and lengthy, with trailing flavors of iron, anise and chamomile tea.
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Wine & Spirits
The flush of youth is a strong pull in this pinot noir. Despite the undergirding of oak and whole-cluster spice, there’s a wine bursting with vibrant red-cherry flavor, with horehound and clove scents backing up the fruit. Every element is intriguing—wait at least a year before uncorking this for flank steak.
Bergstrom Wines is a family-owned and operated artisan producer of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay which was started in 1999 by Dr. John and Karen Bergstrom, with the help of their son Josh Bergstrom and his wife Caroline. Josh is general manager, vineyard manager and winemaker and pulls his expertise from his education in Burgundy, France and his 14 years experience making wines in Oregon's Northern Willamette Valley. Bergstrom focuses on hand-crafting small lots of wines from their fice estate vineyards carefully chosen from fice of Oregon's six wine-growing appellations. All estate acreage is farmed biodynamically and all wines express the wonderful diversity of Oregon's many great terroirs.
Bergström Wines consists of five estate vineyards totaling 84 acres that span across four of the Willamette Valley’s best appellations: The Bergström Vineyard, Silice Vineyard, Winery Block, Gregory Ranch and Le Pré du Col. Each estate vineyard is farmed without the use of harsh chemicals, systemic or fertilizers, and the winery produces approximately 10,000 cases of ultra-premium and extremely sought-after wine each year, including two Chardonnays and nine different Pinot Noirs.
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.