Winemaker Notes
The Les Dijonnai Pinot Noir represents the best barrels from this warm site. In contrast with the Pommard clone bottlings, the Les Dijonnais Pinot Noir offers a more floral interpretation of the grape, often displaying hints of rose petal and meadow flowers.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Pinot Noir Les Dijonnais has a medium ruby-purple color and perfumed red cherries, cranberry sauce, lavender and tangerine with spicy accents. The medium-bodied palate is silky with crunchy, fragrant fruit and has refreshing acidity that highlights all those pretty perfumed notes on the long finish.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2019 Pinot Noir Les Dijonnais is pure, with notes of cherry, pine, medicinal herbs, and black raspberry. The palate is dry and medium-bodied, with ripe raspberry, rose hip, light quinine, and turned earth.
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James Suckling
A pretty nose of raspberries, re currants, sour cherries, rhubarb, dried herbs and baking spices. Medium-bodied with creamy tannins and bright acidity. Balanced and layered with a fleshy texture. Pure and transparent. So juicy and delicious. From biodynamically grown grapes with Demeter certification. Drink now or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a spicy vintage for this multi-Dijon clone blend sourced from a block planted a quarter century ago. It’s aromatic and textured, with threads of berries, coffee grounds, cocoa, vanilla, bourbon tea and more, all nicely layered in and blended. The tannins are moderate, and the acidity keeps it lively, with a long and elegant finish. It was aged 16 months in 30% new French oak. Drink now and over the next decade. Cellar Selection.
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Wine Spectator
Features a silky texture that envelopes a vibrant core of acidity and highlights multilayered cherry and raspberry flavors, which are laced with green tea and stony mineral accents.
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!