Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Sleek and vibrant, with multilayered raspberry and red plum flavors highlighted by orange peel and dusky spices. Builds tension toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2031. 4,000 cases made.
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James Suckling
This has aromas of cherries, blueberries, cloves, nutmeg and dried herbs. Excellent concentration here, with juicy fruit and spice wrapped up in a fine-tannin frame. Tangy finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
How is this wine only $25? It has everything I want from a Willamette Valley Pinot Noir at a much higher price point: great fruit, elevated acidity, fine-grained tannins, restrained alcohol and a crisp mouthfeel. Aromas and flavors of sweet red cherries, cocoa powder and brick dust.
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.