Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Pinot Noir Select offers spiced notes of cinnamon, ripe berries, black raspberries, wild herbs, and violets. Medium-bodied, it offers peppery spice through the palate, with chalky tannins, and a light touch of cleansing astringency. I enjoy its somewhat more rustic texture, and it will continue to improve over the next several years.
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Wine Spectator
Graceful and fragrant, this elegantly structured red offers vibrant cherry and strawberry flavors laced with orange peel, fresh violet and dusky spice flavors while gliding toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2033.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Matured in 7% new French oak, the 2023 Pinot Noir Select has slowly unfurling scents of bramble fruit, tea leaves, earth, bitter orange and mushroom. The medium-bodied palate features crunchy, bitters-laced flavors. It has an elegant frame of chalky tannins, juicy acidity and a long, bright finish.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Select is intense, with a burst of balsamic cherry, pine shavings and blood orange forming its bouquet. It feels round and energetic, splashing across the palate with vibrantly ripe red and blue fruit. The 2023 finishes with tension, citrus-infused and long, leaving a tinge of licorice to linger.
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!