Winemaker Notes
This highly acclaimed dry and warm vintage worked perfectly with this great vineyard site to not only accurately reflect the year but also to coax out the spicy, floral, and playful (yet serious) characteristics of this great thin-soiled, marine-sedimentary terroir. In a word, this wine is irresistible. Delicious now, but this great Pinot Noir will also age and develop positively for a decade. It has an exotically alluring bouquet of sweet spices, rare woods, incense, forest floor, and ripe cane berries. Rich, silky, and suave, with a full-bodied textural swath of fruit that washes over the palate with waves of ripe flavors, finally giving way to a wonderful chocolate, coffee, and sweet bakind spice finish that lasts and lasts. What a swan song vintage and wine for the Shea and Bergström families as a celebration of partnership and community!
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The Shea cuvée blends multiple blocks from this diverse and exceptional vineyard. It's dense with blackberry and black-cherry fruit, concentrated and more than a little deep. Highlights of cocoa, coffee grounds, truffle and tobacco trail out through a lingering, captivating finish.
Editors' Choice -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale ruby, the 2018 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard is delicately scented of dried herbs, pepper, earth and bright red berries. The palate is soft and juicy with earth-laced fruits and a long, spicy finish.
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Wine Spectator
Refined and firmly structured, with focused cherry, crushed stone and dusky spice accents that build tension toward medium-grained tannins. Hands off for now.
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.