Winemaker Notes
This vineyard is named for the underlying outcrop of rock ridging perpendicularly to the hillside. Flavors are vivid, with moderate alcohols and firm but balanced structure. What stands out most are the aromatics—bright fruit, floral notes, and complexity on the finish. 2023 reflects the season itself: dynamic.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Pinot Noir Outcrop comes from layered volcanic soils influenced by the Missoula Floods and pours a pale reflective ruby hue. A touch of reduction quickly gives way to bright red fruit, cranberry, graphite, and mineral spice. Wadenswil vines planted between 1982 and 2005 contribute tremendous focus and tension, with knife-edge precision that never turns austere.
Rating: 96+
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James Suckling
Aromas and flavors of bright red cherries, cranberries, cloves, cinnamon candy and subtle undertones of minerals and resinous herbs. Starts out feeling light-bodied, but shows more richness on the mid-palate and volcanic tannins in the glass. Drinkable now with decanting, or try after 2027.
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Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Outcrop is fruit-driven, with cherries, strawberries, citrus spice and sweet herbs. The palate is juicy and playful, with vibrant acidity and bright wild berry fruits over silky textures. It finishes fresh and gently tannic with a pleasant tartness alongside nuances of plum and licorice.
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.