Winemaker Notes
The 2017 Coury is best enjoyed with a bone-in pork chop and served with a demi-glace.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has polish and complexity with assertively spicy oak, played into the hands of ripe red-cherry and plum aromas and flavors. The tannins are succulent and carry upbeat fruit presence well into the finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Old Vine Coury has a pale to medium ruby color and soft aromas of dried earth, tree bark, amaro and potpourri hints with a core of Bing cherries and blackberries. The palate is light to medium-bodied with saline notes and a sleek texture, offering good intensity, grainy tannins and great freshness, finishing long and layered.
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.”
Stretching southwest from the city of McMinnville, the AVA with the same name covers about 40,000 acres across 20 miles until it meets the Van Duzer Corridor. This corridor is the only break in the Coast Range whose gap allows the cool Pacific Ocean air to flow eastward into the Willamette Valley.
The Pacific's moderating winds hit McMinnville’s south and southeast facing slopes where cool-climate varieties—namely Pinot noir and Pinot blanc thrive on ridges at between 200 to 1,000 feet in elevation.
Soils here are primarily uplifted marine sedimentary loam and silt, with alluvial formations; McMinnville receives less rainfall than its neighbors to the east because it is situated in the rain shadow of the Coast Range.