Winemaker Notes
Rainier cherry, fresh raspberry, dried rose petals, violets, Redwood forest, rhubarb.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
The estate sits along the eastern flank of the Dundee Hills, Jackson uses 20% whole cluster on this and they're not doing any hedging in the vine rows, but instead are braiding and bending down the shoots. Hedging tells the vines to ripen the fruit, and this lowers the pH levels in the Dundee Hills where ripeness is never a chal, keeping acidity fresh. Tissagé method it's called and works well in his low vigour site. This wine delivers a mineral crispness and fresh edge, where Dundee Hills Pinots can be more opulent than many parts of the valley. Mint leaves and ocean brine, with piquant blood orange leaves you with a salty, pine sap finish, it's elegant and wild all at once.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pinot Noir Holstein Estate was fermented with 20% whole clusters and matured for 11 months in 20% new French oak. The nose is bursting with strawberry, pomegranate, blood orange, damp earth and tea leaves. Medium-bodied, it floods the mouth with layer after layer of perfumed, crunchy fruit. It’s framed by fine, chalky tannins and fireworks of fresh acidity and has a very long, layered finish.
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.