Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2005 Pinot Noir Carter Vineyard offers lots of blue fruit aromas and flavors. It has superb depth as well as bracing acidity and well-integrated tannin. The long, pure finish lasts for 45+ seconds. Give this beauty 6-8 years to blossom and drink it through 2030.
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Wine Enthusiast
The Carter vineyard, planted in 1983, is close to Canary Hill and carries similar cherry fruit flavors, but in a lighter, softer, much more delicate frame. It's a bit like licking the foam from around the top of a cherry cola sundae – it’s that airy and flavorful. Persistent, textural flavors suggest spicy blue plum, cranberry and rhubarb, with a splash of mint in the finish.
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.