Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This cuvée has a very energetic and intense feel with a wealth of fresh and attractive red cherries and raspberries, plenty of florals and subtle herbal, forest-wood and light-chocolate notes. There’s a very keenly articulated feel to the palate with a plush, very fleshy and assertively long, detailed finish. Deep fruit presence here. Drink across the next decade.
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Wine & Spirits
Louise is one of Cristom’s warmer, low-elevation sites, with both Jory soils and flood deposits on its lower slopes. The wine is sleek and warm, with scents of tar and black cherries, and bright flavors of cherry and red plum delivered with polished tannins. It could age for years; then serve with quail.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Louise Vineyard was made with 49% whole clusters and aged 18 months in 66% new French oak. Pale to medium ruby, it has a pretty nose of dried lilac and lavender, dusty earth, saline, rhubarb and cranberry with amaro accents and a savory undercurrent. The palate is medium-bodied and silky with slowly blossoming flavor layers and a finely knit frame, finishing long and minerally with juicy acidity to lift. This is a more serious style that will require a couple more years in bottle to fully come into its own.
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Wine Spectator
Refined and elegantly complex, with harmonious raspberry and cranberry flavors, accented by black tea notes and building structure toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2024.
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Wine Enthusiast
This delivers lightly spicy cherry fruit in a swath of milk chocolate. Two-thirds of the barrels were new, and half the ferment included whole clusters. Balanced throughout, it finishes with an astringent tea leaf note.
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Decanter
Fresh and liquorice-vivid, with pure, graceful raspberries and redcurrant fruits. Sweet vanilla oak and forest floor notes. Delicious.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.