Winemaker Notes
Deep ruby in color. The nose boasts a flamboyant, perfumed, fruity, floral, and mineral bouquet. Generously spiced with five Chinese spices, black licorice, and wild fennel. There is also an immensely appealing and salivating beef broth or veal demi-glace/meaty mushroom note. This wine is full of blueberry and dark berry flavors and is silky with a suave oak influence and spices from the vineyard. It has a lovely long finish with sweet fruit concentration. It is one of the finest Silice Vineyard expressions we have .
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Effusively fruited the Silice is so named for the sandy silica soils, the hallmark of the hilly Chehalem Mountain vineyard source. Aromatics of red strawberries and candied raspberry with just a touch of wintergreen freshness provide lift. The palate shows mouthfuls of red bramble fruits, red plums spicy cola and clove and hints of chicory spice bring on the finish.
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James Suckling
Juicy, well-crafted and crunchy, with forest berries, strawberries, cranberries and stone. Medium-bodied with silky tannins and bright acidity. Refined and crisp with a floral touch. Delicate yet intense, with a restrained character and a delicious finish with a white pepper lift. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir Silice Vineyard is transparent and pure. It has detailed aromas of cranberry, pomegranate and tangerine peel, while accents of mossy bark and mushrooms evoke a shady forest. The medium-bodied palate is concentrated and dynamic with flavors that shift from fruit to earth and spice. It has a silky texture, vibrant acidity and a long, spicy finish. It will mature gracefully over the next 10+ years.
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Wine Spectator
A precise and expressive version, whose well-knit flavors of raspberry and guava take on forest floor and black tea notes as this builds tension and richness toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2034. 1,119 cases made.
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Vinous
The 2022 Pinot Noir Silice is perfumed with a dusty array of spring flowers, chamomile, crushed stones, cola and dried black cherries. It’s soothingly round and supple with depths of ripe wild berry fruit complicated by tactile mineral tones that amass toward the close. The Silice takes a turn toward tension through the finish, structured with fine-grained tannins and a tart cranberry resonance that lingers on. The Silice vineyard is located in the Chehalem Mountains AVA, planted on sandy soils in a particularly windy location. Give this time to find its inner harmony.
Rating: 93+
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.