Winemaker Notes
The 2024 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir positively shines with its lovely ruby color and bright aromas of strawberry, fresh florals and thyme. On the palate, vibrant red fruit takes center stage, notably pomegranate and plum. The long finish brings forward our estate’s classic spice and wild herb flavors, making this a balanced and expressive wine that one can enjoy now or allow to age as you like.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Aromas of wild blackberries, marionberries, sandstone, crushed violets and rose petals. Medium-bodied with structured, chalky tannins, dark fruit flavors of black cherries and red plums and a long finish. Drink after 2028.
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Wine Spectator
Supple yet keenly structured, with precise flavors of raspberry and cranberry framed by orange blossom, rose petal and dusky spice tones as this builds toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2035.
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.