Winemaker Notes
The 2017 Bergström Wines Gregory Ranch Pinot Noir is dark cranberry in color, and has a lovely bouquet of wild mushrooms, pipe tobacco, ripe strawberries, and dark raspberries. Potentiallly one of the greatest wines we have crafted from this property, the 2017 vintage has a lot of charm now with serious spice box, tobacco, earth, fruit flavors and copious fine ripe tannins for the long haul.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The medium ruby colored 2017 Pinot Noir Gregory Ranch Vineyard opens with serious notes of scorched earth, burnt citrus peel and spicy accents over scents of warm blackberries, mossy bark, Earl Grey tea leaves, rose petals and red berry hints. The medium-bodied palate offers appealing, bitters-laced flavors with firm but granular tannins and great freshness, finishing long and spicy. With its abundance of fruit and stricter structure, I expect this will age well in bottle.
Rating: 92+
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Wine Enthusiast
This is loaded with spicy red fruits, notably cranberry and pomegranate. There's a whiff of truffle, along with some light stem flavors suggesting that a percentage of whole clusters was included.
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Wine & Spirits
This wine possesses the broad and succulent weight associated with fruit from Oregon’s sedimentary soils. It also has the depth of flavor, its deep briary cherry notes offering stalwart intensity. For braised lamb.
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Wine Spectator
Vibrant, with a spirited structure and multilayered cherry, cranberry and orange peel accents that pick up speed toward polished tannins.
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.”
Yamhill-Carlton, characterized by pastoral, rolling hills composed of shallow, quick-draining, ancient marine soil, is ideal for Pinot noir and other cool-climate-loving varieties. It is in the rain shadow of the Coast Range to its west, whose highest point climbs to an altitude of 3,500 feet. Yamhill-Carlton is actually surrounded by mountains on three sides: Chehalem Mountains to the north, the Dundee Hills to the east and the western Coast Range to its west, which, when it lets Pacific air through, serves to cool the region.
Vineyards grow on the ridges surrounding the two small communities of Yamhill and Carlton and cover about 1,200 acres of this 60,000 acre region, which roughly makes a horse-shoe shape on a map.