Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This barrel selection is a 50-50 blend of Pommard and Dijon clone Pinot Noir, all biodynamically farmed. It's spicy and complex, with cranberry, orange peel and lemon aromas. Those flavors are in the mix, along with black cherry, clean earth and dashes of cola and sassafras. A glorious wine, it should be enjoyed now through the late 2020s.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple colored, the 2015 Pinot Noir Evelyn's is a little youthfully mute, conjuring notions of red currants and pomegranate with hints of wild thyme, yeast extract, damp loam and mossy bark. Light to medium-bodied, the palate has a wonderfully fine-grained texture supporting elegant, delicate fruit, finishing with long-lasting savory and spice notes.
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Wine & Spirits
A reserve named for Doug Tunnell’s mother, Evelyn’s is a barrel selection that usually ends up being a clonal selection as well. Like Les Dijonnais (also recommended here), it’s a dark thing, with a balsamic spice that recedes with air. It’s spry and lifted, yielding an array of spices and becoming more streamlined as it opens, with a fine lacy acid structure that should lend it some ageability.
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Wine Spectator
Soft, supple and delicate, with floral cherry and dark tea aromas and elegantly complex raspberry and smoky spice flavors that glide along the finish. Drink now through 2023. 500 cases made.
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!