Winemaker Notes
#16 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2023
The 2021 Pinot Noir Laurène upholds the cuvée’s 30-year tradition of excellence, elegance, expressiveness and ageability. The energetic nose reveals notes of baked Rainier cherry and candied orange peel, with subtle sage and wild herb undertones. On the palate, blueberry notes intertwine with baking spice and anise, offering a complex and layered experience. In your glass or in your cellar, the 2021 Laurène is a pure reflection of vintage, place and people.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Pinot Noir Laurène is especially complex and expressive. Pomegranate, rhubarb and strawberry are accented by wafts of rosewater, tar, blood orange and lavender. The medium-bodied palate features generous, nuanced flavors. It’s structured by chalky tannins and fireworks of fresh acidity and has a very long, nuanced finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
The Laurène gently caresses the palate like the rider’s steadying hand on a skittish horse. Aromas of lavender, dark raspberry, hay and the salinity of an ocean breeze swirl gently from the glass. Blackberry compote and blackcap raspberry flavors are joined by wisps of Earl Grey tea and thyme.
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James Suckling
What a seductive nose of rose petals, cranberries, strawberries, chocolate orange, cinnamon stick and lemon zest. Spicy, zesty and vibrant, with a medium body and tight-grained tannins. Elegant with a very fine structure.
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Wine Spectator
Rich and detailed, with a deep but graceful structure, offering rose petal, raspberry, orange peel and dusky spice flavors that build tension and polish toward fine-grained tannins.
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Jeb Dunnuck
A deep ruby, the 2021 Pinot Noir Laurene is ripe with cherry fruit, turned earth, and crushed violets. Medium to full-bodied, with ripe tannins, a meaty texture, and good freshness, it has a good, clean finish.
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.