Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
Loaded with personality, the wild and wonderful 2014 Four Graces Reserve Pinot Noir takes the palate on a magic carpet ride of aromas and flavors—wild red fruits, aromatic flowers, wild herbs, savory spices, Old World rusticity, brown leaves, and oak. Pair this wonderous wine with a free-range wild turkey. (Tasted: November 16, 2017, San Francisco, CA)
-
Wine Enthusiast
This reserve begins as a vineyard-block selection, and spends nine months in 100% French oak. It's bright and brambly, melding citrus skins and oils, fresh raspberries and cherries, and a touch of chocolate. There's a hint of dustiness as well, and it's drinking quite well already: no need to wait.
-
Wine & Spirits
This is classic Dundee Hills pinot from the original estate purchased by the Black Family in 2003. It’s red fruited, firmed up by earth tones, the texture plush. The succulent cherry fruit meets a tactile red-dust texture in the tannins, which keeps the fruit lifted, as does the prickle of acidity on the finish. Drink it with truffled farfalle. (992 cases)
-
Wine Spectator
Precise and well-structured, with rose petal and cherry aromas and layered raspberry and loamy mineral flavors. Finishes with fine tannins. Drink now through 2022. 992 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.