Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Perfumed, savory, herbal nose. There are lanolin, sandalwood, and floral tones throughout with cranberry and great depth on the palate. Juicy, elegant, long, and intense.
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James Suckling
There’s a very deep fruit style to the selection here, offering plenty of earthy and meaty complexity with a very assertive, ripe and dark-fruited core that displays plenty of power. The depth here beckons some bottle aging.
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Wine Enthusiast
This reserve is an excellent representation of the 2015 vintage. Firm, supple and loaded with brambly purple fruit, it carries a pleasing touch of fruit sweetness. It rolls gracefully into a tight finish, with layers of herb, earth, blueberry, black cherry and brown spice notes.
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Wine Spectator
Polished and gracefully complex, with refined raspberry and strawberry flavors accented by toasty cinnamon and river stone notes, finishing with lithe tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The pale to medium ruby-purple 2015 Pinot Noir Evenstad Reserve opens with touches of tar and tilled earth over black cherries, blackcurrants and licorice laced with brown sugar and cardamom. Medium to full-bodied, it fills the mouth with warm fruits and spices and has a good frame of fine, grainy tannins with juicy freshness and potpourri/tea leaf suggestions on the long finish.
Rating: 91+
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.