Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Sourced from the original (1990) planting of Pommard clone vines, this shows thick black cherry fruit, scattered with multi-seed bread and wet hay notes. The flavors are persistent and full, with streaks of coffee and chocolate from having aged in 30% new oak. It's astonishing that Doug Tunnell can offer such glorious wines at such mild prices.
Editor's Choice -
Wine Spectator
Plump and supple, with floral raspberry and spice aromas and rich, layered pomegranate, spice and cinnamon flavors that linger toward refined tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Pinot Noir Cuvee du Tonnelier has a pale ruby-purple color and youthfully subdued nose of underbrush, dried herbs and truffles with a core of cranberries, red currants and pomegranate, plus a waft of lavender. Light to medium-bodied, the palate has beautiful poise with a nice understated intensity and a good grip of tannins, finishing long and earthy.
Rating: 92+ -
Wine & Spirits
From the Brick House property’s oldest vines, planted in 1990 before the introduction of Dijon clones, this is mostly planted to the Pommard clone. It shows the tonnelier’s, or cooper’s, hand at the moment, a broad-shouldered wine with a fair bit of oak spice, clove, nutmeg and caramel. With air the fruit flavors fall into line, a blue streak of dark plum to fill those oak tones.
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!