Winemaker Notes
Typically this cuvée offers cinnamon, allspice and earthy notes of forest floor and bramble. The Cuvée du Tonnelier includes significant whole cluster fermented fruit, contributing powerful structure with supple fruit.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Sourced from the estate’s original 1990 plantings, this sadly marks the final vintage for these phylloxera-affected vines, which have now been removed and replanted. It’s a sweet farewell, dense and aromatic with plum and black cherry fruit. The seashell highlights characteristic of the AVA can be sniffed out, along with a substrate of lightly bitter herb. This lovely wine should bring pleasure for many years to come. Editors’ Choice.
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Wine Spectator
Refined and a bit brooding at first, this slowly unveils itself with refined and multilayered raspberry and cherry flavors laced with cinnamon and rose petal. Finishes with fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2028.
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!