Winemaker Notes
This wine has a beautiful balance of raspberry fruit profile with warm spice, black tea and a delicate cocoa. The fruit on the palate is juicy but if you lean in there is a quiet brooding character to this wine that still has a lot yet to give. The Acid holds the fruit in check and the tannins keep the gentle momentum into a long finish. In a word, ‘delicious’.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Big Table Farm’s appellation wine blends fruit from a number of its old-vine vineyard sources. It’s slightly less structured than the 2017 Earth cuvée (also recommended), but it’s no less expressive or generous. It’s jumping with energy, saturating the palate with notes of smoke and warm macerated cherries, and with enough savor to remain complex. Chill it for a summer picnic.
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James Suckling
Enticing, fragrant complexity with ripe, boysenberry and red-cherry notes, married to a plush palate that has an attractive, balanced and velvety feel. Long, fresh-fruit flavors hold smoothly. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
Lovely aromatics burst from the glass, with scents of rose petal, cocoa and cherry. Flavors follow, along with threads of cola, green tea and skin tannins. It’s firm and compact, opening slowly and adding still more details with scents of toasted peanuts. Great aging potential here. Drink now through the late 2020s.
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Wine Spectator
Combines polish with structure, offering delicate raspberry, spice and forest floor accents that build richness toward broad-shouldered tannins. Drink now through 2026.
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.