Winemaker Notes
Fruit focused. Light tannins and bright acidity. Red and blue fruit-juicy red plum, pie cherry and marionberry.
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
The Canary Hill is an aromatic powerhouse, combining blackberries, black tea, wet rocks and bittersweet dark chocolate. The wine’s rich, smooth texture is a perfect foil for flavors of cherry-vanilla gelato flecked with dark chocolate chips. There’s more than enough acidity and mildly chewy tannins to provide balance.
-
Wine Spectator
A wine that combines structure and verve, this Pinot is expressive, with raspberry and blueberry flavors laced with crushed stone, anise and dusky spices. Builds tension toward refined tannins.
-
James Suckling
Excellent concentration to this pinot with mulberries, dark raspberries, cola, cloves and anise on the nose. It’s medium-bodied and focused, with compact tannins and lingering dark spiciness. Drink or hold.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.