Winemaker Notes
One of five cuvées that are produced identically, with the same fermentation regimes of wild yeast and small fermentation vessels, followed by aging in blends of cooperage with 12% new oak in each. The result is a fascinating journey up the Dundee Hills, from their lowest elevation Sisters vineyard at 220’ up to our highest elevation Daphne vineyard at 860’. Each wine reflects facets of soil, site, exposure, and vine age that together capture a precise portrait of how variations in place can influence Pinot Noir.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Pouring a pale ruby hue, the 2021 Pinot Noir The Eyrie is fantastically detailed and reveals layered aromas of fresh cardamom, rose petal, and wild raspberry. The palate is tension-packed, with a linear feel and ripe red-berried fruit, but it’s more about its mineral and gravelly texture, with mouthwatering salinity and balanced fruit throughout. It also offers a touch of toasty cedar on the finish. It’s coiled at this stage and will benefit from another 2 or more years in bottle to start to show its best. Drink 2025-2035.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Pinot Noir The Eyrie's initial flintiness takes plenty of time to give way to deeper scents of cranberry, pipe tobacco, pepper, bergamot and charcuterie. The medium-bodied palate is luxuriously silky and seamless, with a latent core of spicy fruit and a long, savory finish. It's youthfully coiled and deserves five or more years in the cellar to unwind. Rating: 95+
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Wine Spectator
Graceful and elegantly multilayered, with delicate cherry and cranberry flavors laced with green tea and dusky spices. Ends with refined tannins.
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Wine & Spirits
This is reticent at first, with a dusty, red-fruited scent and notes of char. The wine turns bright and floral with air, all red cherries and cherry tobacco. That savory tobacco note keeps the wine a bit fusty throughout, with tannins that need a foil, like duck breast.
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.