Winemaker Notes
With an attractive black cherry robe, the Gregory Ranch 2018 opens with a ripe and attractive aromatic bouquet of cherries, blackberries, exotic spices, incense, and dark chocolate. Flavors of ripe strawberry, blackberry pie, and black cherries echo on the palate with a great spice. This wine is immensely structured and not unlike a young Barolo, needing years of patience but promising rewards with this site’s trademark depth and complexity.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Some depth to the hue with aromas of ripe dark cherries and dark plums, as well as violets and wild herbs. The palate has such impressive grain to the tannin and carries a wealth of juicy, dark-cherry flavor. So fresh and taut.
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Wine & Spirits
Gregory Ranch is a 21-acre vineyard that the Bergströms planted for the Gregory Family in 2007 and have farmed biodynamically from its inception. The wine is rich and dark, with a wet-earth reductive note that gives way to suede and mushroom. In contrast, the flavors are organized around penetrating and pure red fruit—cherry, pomegranate—with a baking-spice savor.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Pinot Noir Gregory Ranch has a medium ruby-purple color and aromas of cranberry sauce, turned earth, tobacco leaves and blood orange. The palate is broody and grainy with earthy character and a juicy finish.
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.