Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Jeb Dunnuck
Moving to the Domaine Drouhin Oregon lineup from the Dundee Hills, the 2021 Pinot Noir Dundee Hills is ripe with ripe black cherry, fresh licorice, and dark stone. Lush and inviting, with ripe structure and broad shoulders, it is flush with a ripe, meaty texture and warming spice. Allow it another couple of years in the cellar. This is an age-worthy wine to drink 2025-2037.
-
James Suckling
Fragrant and open pinot with aromas of cherries, wild strawberries, orange zest, nutmeg and white pepper. It’s medium-bodied with silky, creamy tannins. Delicious balance of just-ripe berry fruit and subtle spice. Very long, too. Drink or hold.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Ripe black cherries mix with aromas of sugar cookies and beeswax to create a perfume worthy of dabbing on pulse points. Blackcap raspberries dominate the palate, joined by unsweetened dark chocolate and espresso shots. The wine’s elevated acidity and velvety tannins join a creamy texture in a most delightful way.
-
Wine Spectator
Graceful and fragrant, with delicately layered cherry and raspberry flavors laced with rose petal, dusky spices and a hint of fresh forest floor. Ends with refined tannins.
-
Decanter
Aromatic and ripe, dark fruit combined with notes of dried herbs and a touch of spice. Embellished oak lends richness, but the palate is fresh, refined and savoury. Opulent and well-executed in style.
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.