Winemaker Notes
The Dundee Hills Incline represents the winery's barrel selection of the “crème de la crème” of the 2015 vintage. Aromatically this wine shows bright pomegranate, red cherry, rose and iron. The palate is generous and full, showing ripe red fruit and silky tannins. The wine has ample concentration and bright acidity, which will allow aging for 10+ years.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Incline Pinot Noir, which is from the La Colina Vineyard in Dundee Hills, exudes greater purity on the bouquet than the 2014, touches of darker fruit intermixed with the red, blackberry and bilberry here, almost pastille-like. The palate is medium-bodied with fine tannin, crisp acidity, and there is good precision here, more purity on the finish compared to the 2014. This delivers fine Pinoté, much more than previous vintages, and it should age with style over the next decade.
Range:91-93 -
Wine Spectator
Note that the winery, the project of second generation Beaux Frères founders Jared Etzel and Marc-André Roy, makes a Petite Incline as well as two Incline Pinots from different AVAs. This dark, dense wine, packed with deep black fruit flavors, perfectly captures the classic signature of the Dundee Hills AVA. Subtle notes of iron ore, coffee grounds, tar and tobacco add complexity and length.
Editors' Choice
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.