Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine & Spirits
This blend is focused on Cristom’s four Eola–Amity Hills vineyards. It’s a dense mélange of stem spice, smoke, graham flour and tobacco, with plummy fruit that absorbs the savory elements, and a sturdy oak component that cradles the lot of it in a warm embrace. Tasted over several days it gains polish and elegance, the oak integrating into something more burnished and structural, lending direction without weight.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Ripe elderberry, blackberry and purple plum mingle with savory salted pork stock, high-toned evocations of basil and gentian wafting from the nose; across a silken palate; and all the way through a lingering, saliva-inducing finish. The clarity of fruit, poise, refinement, and mouthwatering length here set it well apart from the corresponding Jefferson, and I would anticipate a decade of satisfaction.
-
Wine Spectator
Ripe flavors of blueberry and plum dance on a medium-weight frame, shaded by hints of pepper and clove, underlined by fine tannins. A hint of orange tea emerges on the finish. Drink now through 2017.
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.