Winemaker Notes
The Incline Pinot Noir takes a more focused view: sourced entirely from the Quartz Acorn Vineyard in the YamhillCarlton AVA, it offers the fruitiness and mineral character typical of the Yamhill-Carlton marine sedimentary terroir.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A floral, mineral-driven, medium-bodied wine with aromas of sandstone, tart Bing cherries and rose petals. The palate is super fresh, with salty, wild herb and tangerine flavors that are really delicious. The finish is super long, and rose petals and bright cherries come through at the end along with a tangy orange peel note. Drink or hold.
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Vinous
The 2024 Pinot Noir Incline Yamhill-Carlton opens with a bouquet of ripe raspberry, licorice, rose buds and dusty earth. The palate is soothingly round, with floral-laced red berry fruits and a crunch of minerality that adds lovely form. Violet inner florals cascade through the long yet wonderfully fresh finale. The 2024 tapers off gently tannic, fresh and inviting.
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Wine Spectator
Combining intensity with grace, this Pinot offers refined flavors of cherry and raspberry laced with stony mineral and dusky spice notes while building tension toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2035.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Darker ruby in color, the 2022 Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Incline comes from their estate Quartz Acorn Vineyard in Yamhill Carlton and is floral with notes of lavender, black raspberries, piney herbs, and rocky earth. Medium-bodied and elegant, with fine, ripe tannins, a juicy, even feel, and clean, fresh acidity, it’s a very appealing wine to enjoy over the next 6-7 years.
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.