Winemaker Notes
The Mirabai 2019 is a light-to-medium, youthful blue-red with brilliant transparency. Like all of my other 2019 bottlings, it is certainly lighter in colour and more nuanced than my 2018. True to the Dundee Hills, this Mirabai begins with a beautiful, fresh strawberry nose with subtle spices and tastes of the same carried by the lightest drape of silk. To me, this luminous Mirabai is both heart-warming and uplifting.
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.