Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Jeb Dunnuck
The 2022 Pinot Noir Daphne sports a deeper jeweled ruby color and offers notes of pure black cherries, forest pine herbs, wildflowers, and dark stones. Coming from their highest elevation vineyard, it is pure and crystalline on the palate, with a rounded and expansive feel, ripe tannins, and a clean finish. It’s a fantastic and complete offering and might be the wine of the vintage for Eyrie.
Rating: 97+ -
Wine Enthusiast
My favorite Daphne this side of "Scooby Doo" is a small plot of 50-year-old Pommard vines planted at 820-860 feet in the Dundee Hills. Its refreshing aromas of rose petals, rosemary, plums, pine needles and wet slate lead to flavors like Bing cherries, marjoram, lavender and green tea. Daphne's fleshy texture is joined by bright acidity and silky tannins.
Editors' Choice -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir Daphne comes from Pommard clone vines planted between 1974 and 1984 at 820 to 860 feet in elevation. Matured in 12% new oak, the nose is bursting with pure scents of bramble berry preserves, blood orange, oolong tea leaves and juniper. Medium-bodied, the mouth is flooded with layer after layer of ripe, perfumed fruit. The wine is structured by lacy tannins, vibrant acidity and a long, succulent finish.
-
James Suckling
Crushed strawberries, frozen raspberries, dried violets and mixed spices on the nose. Medium-bodied with a juicy, fruit-driven character on the palate and zesty acidity. Round, mellow and velvety with plenty of juicy candied cherry character in the flavorful, long finish. There is so much vibrancy at the center. Drink now or hold.
-
Vinous
The 2022 Pinot Noir Daphne is a veritable flower shop on the nose, mixing peppery rose with wild strawberries and cedary spice. Lifted and racy in feel, it washes across the palate with crisp red berry fruits, taking on perfumed inner florals and a tinge of salty minerality toward the close. Hints of sour citrus mix with a tart cranberry bitterness as a bump of brilliant acidity ties everything together remarkably well, finishing fresh and full of tension. While not overtly structured or concentrated, the Daphne possesses a balance that promises many years of positive evolution.
-
Wine Spectator
Trim and slightly tight at the moment, with dark berry, fresh herb and forest floor accents that end with tight tannins. Best from 2026 through 2033. 178 cases made.
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.