Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
There's a focus and precision to this pinot with refined tannins and beautiful fruit. A medium to full body characterised a firm, polished and tight center palate of fruit and tannins.
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Wine Enthusiast
Rich and textural, this gloriously mixes raspberries, cherries, baking spices, cola, cocoa and coconut components, all woven together seamlessly. It's forward and juicy, yet built for medium-term aging. Drink now through 2026.
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Wine & Spirits
There’s a wonderful purity of flavor in this vintage of Domaine Drouhin’s flagship wine, with beguiling scents of earth and juicy plum. With air the wine becomes darker, more weighty and complex, with demonstrative tannins that need food, like a bavette steak.
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.