Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Laurène is usually a fairly quiet wine, the 2011 made quieter still from the cool vintage. But don’t let its reticence fool you. This is suave and lightly spiced, with clove and red cherry flavors and a firm and elegant texture. The dusty red cherry flavors are due to round a corner with some cellar time.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
There is a welcome (if, in one sense, too large) leap in quality from their basic "classique" bottling and Drouhin’s 2011 Pinot Noir Laurene. High-toned almond and pistachio extracts along with smoky black tea inflect the lightly cooked and distilled rhubarb, cherry and black raspberry on exhibit on the penetrating nose and silken yet tart-edged palate of this Pinot. There is a smoky barrel attribute and considerable underlying tannin but they are well-integrated and don’t detract from the juicy finishing flow of fruit. Hints of brown spice add stimulation, and I expect this to show even better by the time it is released in another year. It ought to be worth following through at least 2020.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.