Winemaker Notes
Expressive and refined, our 2022 Pinot Noir Laurène captures the exquisite essence of the Dundee Hills. Charismatic on the nose, it weaves together dried rose petals, elderberry, tart cherries, spiced vanilla, rhubarb, and wild herbs. The palate offers dark cherries, candied orange, clove, and a subtle hint of toasted oak in a richly complex and layered experience. The 2022 Laurène is young but serious. With its silky texture and elegant structure, this wine promises to mature gracefully over the next 10-15 years.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The medium ruby-colored 2022 Pinot Noir Laurene is more layered and complex, with a cologne consisting of cedar, leather, black cherries, wild raspberries, umami savory notes, and mossy earth. Medium-bodied, it has more structure and slightly broader shoulders, with ripe tannins and evenly balanced, ripe acidity. It’s only going to improve with time and will drink well over the next 20 years.
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Decanter
The Drouhin estate's flagship Pinot Noir is a barrel selection comprised of fruit from their Dundee Hills estate. Perfectly perfumed with classic Willamette Valley berries, forest floor and notes of singed rose petals and dried lavender. The palate shows dusty bramble fruits, concentrated tart blackberries and a freshness alighting from muddled mint leaves. A melange of five spice, smoky clove and forest-inspired minerality carries this wine, its elegance and structure give a hint to its ageability.
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Wine Spectator
Poised and silky in texture, with elegantly layered flavors of raspberry and cherry highlighted by rose petal, spice and forest floor tones as this gathers richness toward polished tannins.
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.