Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale ruby-purple in color, the 2014 Pinot Noir Margo has intense cranberries, Bing cherries and lavender scents with suggestions of fragrant earth, underbrush and game. Medium to full-bodied, the palate offers a wonderful intensity of savory and red berry flavors supported by fine-grained tannins and great freshness, finishing with satisfying persistence.
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Wine Spectator
Structured and precise, with brooding plum and loamy mineral aromas and tightly focused black cherry and green tea flavors that gain weight and tannins on the finish. Best after 2018.
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.”
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.