Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Connoisseurs' Guide
This latest Domaine Drouhin Pinot fits the classic Oregon model to a "tee" in that is offers up plenty of lithe fruit and quiet spice while keeping overt ripeness in check. It is not a wine that will please fans of high extract, but it is anything but anemic or thin, and its precise, incisively fruity flavors show remarkable length on the palate. It reminds that a wine can be serious and speak in soft tones at one and the same time, and it will find an easy place with wide range of foods.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2007 Pinot Noir Willamette Valley is the bottling most people are likely to encounter. Medium ruby-colored, it has a fragrant perfume of cedar, spice box, eucalyptus/menthol, cherry, and raspberry. Made in an elegant, racy style, this medium-bodied effort has a vibrant core of spicy red fruits, moderate ripe tannin, excellent intensity, and savory flavors. It will benefit from another 1-2 years of cellaring and offer prime drinking from 2011 to 2019.
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.