Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
The Roland Green Pinot Noir really shows off its elegance and balance. With inviting aromas of rich red fruit, wet soil, and fresh mint leaves, it leads into a palate filled with complex savoury notes. The tannins are impressively smooth, making it a real pleasure to drink, especially for such a young wine. A bright pop of acidity keeps it fresh and lively, tying everything together beautifully.
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Jeb Dunnuck
More muscular, the 2022 Pinot Noir Roland Green has more depth to its ruby red color, but it’s still transparent. The nose benefits from a little air on opening, revealing pure black raspberries, cherry blossoms, dark earth, mossy forest floor, and sweet herbs. It has broader shoulders and a heartier, more muscular feel on the palate, with an expansive structure, so it can stand up to a lot. Built for the long haul, it’s going to hold on for decades. Drink 2025-2040.
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James Suckling
Vivid, floral aromas and dramatic cherry flavors light up this medium-bodied and well-balanced wine. Rose petals, violets, strawberries and raspberries show great breadth on the palate. From organically grown grapes.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir Roland Green comes mainly from Pommard and Wadenswil clone vines planted in 2016 (plus some of the old vines planted in 1988) in volcanic soils at 540 to 720 feet in elevation. Matured in used oak, it has slowly unfurling scents of flint, pomegranate, rhubarb, orange peel, pipe tobacco and underbrush. The full-bodied palate features concentrated, flinty flavors. It’s framed by velvety tannins and bright acidity and has a long, succulent finish. Rating: 95+
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Wine Enthusiast
Roland Green is five acres of Pommard and Wadenswil clones planted at 540-720 feet elevation in the Dundee Hills. Its raspberry, sweet pea flowers and Ponderosa bark aromas are mesmerizing. Texture-wise, this is your favorite pair of corduroys matched with fine-grained tannins and flavors of pie cherries, black pepper, caraway seeds and black pepper. Enjoy now until 2039.
Cellar Selection -
Vinous
The 2022 Pinot Noir Roland Green is savory to the core, with a darkly floral bouquet that blends earth tones and exotic spices with hints of tomato leaf, lavender and blackberries. It opens with a gentle inner sweetness and silky textures as masses of ripe red and blue fruits slowly saturate, developing a mineral tinge toward the close. The 2022 leaves the palate stained in primary concentration as a lick of sour citrus adds contrast and fine-grained tannins coat the senses. Deep and complex, with immaculate balance, the Roland Green is the total package.
Rating: 94+ -
Wine Spectator
Showing a bit tight right now but retains appealing notes of cranberry, sandalwood and peat moss while building tension toward a bite of tannins. Drink now through 2033.
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.