Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
The nose is like bright sunshine with brilliant cherry, cranberry, and shiny penny. A very Burgundian style with a long, balanced finish.
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James Suckling
A very pretty pinot with currant bush, minerals, underbrush, blackcurrants, dark cherries and bark. The palate is extremely polished with fine tannins, fresh acidity, lots of dark, blue fruit that remains balanced and lithe, and a fruity, minerally finish. Drink now or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple, the 2014 Pinot Noir Laurene offers a very fragrant nose of exotic spices—anise, cardamom and fenugreek—over a core of pomegranate, rhubarb, Bing cherries, fertile loam and truffles. Medium-bodied with a taut, fine structure of fine tannins and refreshing acid, the fruit has plenty of earth and red berry layers that linger with great persistence.
Rataing: 92+ -
Wine Spectator
Well-built and offering a precise and complex core, plus raspberry, black tea and spice box accents that finish with refined tannins. Drink now through 2022.
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.