Winemaker Notes
A bright and brilliant light ruby-red color with a slight but beautiful amethyst tint. This wine has a knockout whole-cluster-influenced nose of bright fruit pastilles, candies, violets, roses, cinnamon, and crunchy strawberry and red cherries, with the slightest but most appropriate stem influence. This young Pinot Noir is lively and youthful with succulent fruit sweetness and juicy natural acidity. The 2019 Le Pré du Col is leaping from the glass right now. Great spice expressions in the mouth, and an underlying panoply of savory, incense, and earth as well as a saline sea-breeze-style saltiness that lends seriousness to an otherwise charmingly fruited, floral, and very drinkable young wine that has a great future ahead of it.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A super fragrant expression with citrus peel and bright red cherries, as well as fragrant hard-spice and forest-wood notes. Very plush and fleshy palate with impressive concentration of blueberry and cherry flavors. Long, commanding finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Pinot Noir Le Pré du Col Vineyard is exceptionally layered and elegant this vintage, with detailed raspberries and rose petal perfume and wafts of licorice peel and tangerine. The palate is grainy and bright, already boasting complex flavor layers with crunchy fruits and loads of spicy accents. It finishes with tremendous length.
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Wine Spectator
A lovely red, refined and generous, with vibrant black cherry flavors accented by wildflower, orange peel and dusky spice, building structure toward refined tannins.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2019 Pinot La Pre du Col Vineyard is ripe with raspberry, cinnamon, and dried herbs. The palate is fresh with spice, cranberry, and woodsy earth, followed by a soft texture and a long, elegant finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Lush aromas of orange blossoms and rose petals lead to a full palate with baking spices and sweet chocolate highlights. Black cherry fruit anchors it all, and the mix of cherries and chocolate will be a welcoming beacon to lovers of high-end cacao. That's not to call it candied or sweet, just detailed, textural and absolutely delicious.
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Wine & Spirits
This wine is buzzy with youthful energy. It leads with a heady plum fruit scent and a whiff of cinnamon. While the flavors are plush and rounded, there’s tension running beneath that holds all the youthful fervor in check. The wine becomes more seamless with air, hinting at its trajectory in the cellar.
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.”
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!