Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Perfumed aromas of black cherries, blackberry bush, spice, toffee apple and blood oranges. The palate is medium-bodied with fine-grained tannins and a juicy, plush mouthfeel. There's lovely purity and focus here, with a fruit-driven finish. Delicious. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
Impeccably structured and polished, with tiers of black cherry and raspberry accented by earthy mineral, forest floor and black tea notes as this builds tension and verve toward fine-grained tannins.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Incline bursts from the glass with a vibrant blend of crushed blackberries, blood orange and rose petals. Wickedly fresh, it splashes across the palate with ripe wild berry fruits and citrus tones embellished by violet inner florals. The finish is medium in length yet impactful, leaving subtle tannins and a tart blackberry tinge.
Domaine Roy et Fils began in 2012 with Carc-André Roy and Jared Etzel who continue in their fathers' footsteps whom partnered to establish Beaux Freres Winery in 1991. Over 20 years later, the two families have kept the same focus of producing top quality wine through meticulous and almost obsessive work in the estate vineyards. Domaine Roy et Fils mission is to produce wines of purity and transparency at the highest level from our land in Dundee and Carlton. The wines produced with the Domaine Roy et Fils label are made from the estates vineyards. The Maison Roy et Fils wines are produced from non-estate fruit but made with the same uncompromising process.
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.”
Yamhill-Carlton, characterized by pastoral, rolling hills composed of shallow, quick-draining, ancient marine soil, is ideal for Pinot noir and other cool-climate-loving varieties. It is in the rain shadow of the Coast Range to its west, whose highest point climbs to an altitude of 3,500 feet. Yamhill-Carlton is actually surrounded by mountains on three sides: Chehalem Mountains to the north, the Dundee Hills to the east and the western Coast Range to its west, which, when it lets Pacific air through, serves to cool the region.
Vineyards grow on the ridges surrounding the two small communities of Yamhill and Carlton and cover about 1,200 acres of this 60,000 acre region, which roughly makes a horse-shoe shape on a map.