Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Made in a more Burgundian style, aged 8-10 months in barrel. Elegant, ripe dark fruits, cassis and violets with spicy and smoky notes. Young but pleasing.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
How about it, DDO (as we in the business call Domaine Drouhin) has been making some of the most solid and consistent wines since their inception in 1988. The 2013 Pinot Noir is refined and rich; shows plenty of red fruit goodness; a bit bright and lively now, the wine could use a year or two to settle down; perfect now with lightly crusted salmon. (Tasted: May 6, 2015, San Francisco, CA)
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.