Winemaker Notes
Our 2018 Dundee Hills is complex and structured, a beautiful combination of flavor, intensity, and backbone. Subtle notes of rose petal, raspberry and dark cherries lead into layered flavors of sour cherries, cranberry, black tea, and plum. Although young, there is an extraordinary balance between the fine tannins and energizing lift of vibrant red fruit and acidity. This is a wine that will be exciting to follow as it passes the 5, 10, and 15-year marks.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby-purple, the 2018 Pinot Noir Dundee Hills opens with savory notions of leather, graphite and tobacco with a core of red and blue berry fruits. The palate is medium-bodied with concentrated, incredibly spicy flavor layers, firm and super fresh, and it finishes very long and flavorful. Give it another 2-3 years in bottle.
Rating: 94(+) -
Wine Enthusiast
This is the standard bearer for DDO, all estate fruit and yet produced in sufficient quantities (and priced affordably) to be widely available. It opens with scents of rose petals and blue fruits, introducing an elegant and polished wine with exceptional concentration. It's full-bodied and powerful, with good tension between the ripe blue fruits and the supporting acidity. As with all of Véronique Drouhin's wines, the balance of aromas, flavors and finish makes for a lingering and complete tasting experience.
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James Suckling
This has a very complete and complex, spicy dark-cherry nose with very well integrated spice and bracken complexity. The palate has such beautifully fleshy, rich dark cherries with ample tannin, carrying impressive length and depth. Delicious and already drinkable.
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Wine & Spirits
DDO's estate wine offers dusty red fruit scents limned with oak. The wine's flavors are earthy and cherried, with an angular firmness that's propelled by its oak treatment; for the cellar.
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.