Winemaker Notes
One of Oregon's greatest sites for Pinot Noir, La Source comes from the summit of Seven Springs. Rocky soils and daily wind challenge the vines. These adverse conditions result in the very best wine at Evening Land.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
A lovely wine, sleek yet complex, with expressive rose petal and lavender aromas, opening to refined raspberry, stony mineral and spice flavors that sail toward polished tannins. Drink now through 2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Some of the 2016s from Evening Land were closed and reductive when I tasted them last year. Checking back in on the 2016 Pinot Noir La Source, it's blossomed in bottle, offering up scents of cranberry sauce, rhubarb and blackberries with nuances of peppered meats, woodsmoke, dried leaves and forest floor with floral hints coming through with time in the glass. The medium-bodied palate is silky with intense, ripe fruit, a firm, grainy frame and a long, fresh finish. Tasting this next to its 2017 counterpart, the vintage difference is transparent: the 2016 is ripe and intense, while the 2017 is more delicate with crunchy, fresh fruits.
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Wine Enthusiast
Svelte and smoky, this is a sexy bottle of Pinot Noir. The fruit is supple and seamless, with plums, marionberries, figs and chocolate. Aged for one year in 25% new French oak, it's firm and rippled with touches of olive and mushroom. This exceptional value is simply a riot of flavor.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.