Bergstrom Silice Pinot Noir 2016
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Winemaker Notes
Dark ruby red in color with violet reflections in the glass, the 2016 Silice Pinot Noir has a wild aromatic bouquet that leaps from the glass. Boysenberry and dark cherry fruit mingles with sassafras, cinnamon graham crackers, anise, dried herbs, smoked game, tobacco and leather. This wine is distinctly old world in character with great earthiness, mushroom, meat and tobacco flavors, yet retains a bright core of fresh fruit, spice and flowers with succulent acidity and plentiful fine-grained tannins. This is a wine for the cellar and I recommend giving it 3-5 years before enjoying, but it will live and drink well for two decades or more. If consumed in its first 3 years of life, I recommend splash decanting before drinking.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple in color, the 2016 Pinot Noir Silice Vineyard is very savory on the nose with notions of smoked meats, black pepper and olive over spicy black fruits. Medium to full-bodied, it fills the mouth with brambly black fruits, layers of bacon fat and pepper, with a wonderful juicy freshness to lift all that density and a good frame of grainy tannins, fleshing out on the long, savory finish. This is very Syrah-esque!
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Wine & Spirits
The pinot noir from Silice, a 21-acre vineyard planted to multiple clones of pinot, is typically one of Josh Bergström’s more savory reds. This wine, tasted from magnum, has a pleasing scent somewhere between spice, clove, freshly turned soil and pu-erh tea. The plum flavors are dark and subdued, with an acidity that will make you forget the earthiness as soon as it’s noticed. This is savory and complex, a wine you may need to walk toward to engage, but do so, with game…like roast quail.
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Wine Enthusiast
This new vintage of this signature cuvée has a strong scent of tanned leather, and those tack room flavors mute down the plum and cherry fruit. For some tasters, this is a feature, if not a benefit; for others, it may be a bit disappointing. Just one bottle was provided and tasted.
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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.”
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.