Winemaker Notes
In many ways, the 2018 Laurène embodies what Domaine Drouhin loves most about wines from the Dundee Hills. Offering beautiful clarity and a garnet color on approach, the aromatics brim with notes of dried red cherry, spice, wild herbs, earth, and subtle oak. Characteristically elegant, the wine evolves on the palate, moving seamlessly from its pomegranate welcome into its detailed lines of clove, white pepper, and cranberry. As always, cellaring the Laurène over the next 5-15 years will be well rewarded.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Super complex and rich with a ripe array of red to dark-cherry and plum aromas, as well as toasted-spice oak influence. This has much to enjoy already. The palate has a very rich, fleshy and intense, layered appeal with a swirling, spicy thread of rich red cherries and long, fine, supple tannins.
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Wine Enthusiast
The lush aromatics immediately grab your attention with a tantalizing mix of berries and barrel toast. Already in perfect balance, this young wine weaves its components into a textural mesh highlighted with coffee liqueur and hints of fresh herb. Further bottle age and/or decanting is recommended.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby, the 2018 Pinot Noir Laurène opens with pure raspberry, rhubarb and aniseed perfume with accents of bergamot and forest floor. The medium-bodied palate is concentrated, super spicy, firm and very fresh, finishing uplifted and loaded with perfumed fruits. Give it another 2-3 years in bottle.
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Wine Spectator
A wine of polish and presence, with structured raspberry and cherry flavors that draw in tarragon and steely mineral accents as this builds tension toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now. through 2030. 3,260 cases made.
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.