Winemaker Notes
This wine is ripe and red-fruit forward, showing fresh red berries, bramble, vanilla, and pie crust on the nose, while the palate is juicy with a touch of spice and a long, clean finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Ken Wright has worked with this volcanic site since 1989. The 2023 Pinot Noir Carter Vineyard, from a now 23-acre site originally planted with Pommard, pours a medium ruby and offers notes of pomegranate, incense, wild strawberries, flowers, and bright spice. Medium-bodied, it’s energetic and refined, with fine, angular tannins and a floating, elegant finish.
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Wine Spectator
This rich and nuanced Pinot combines generosity and refinement, offering raspberry and blueberry flavors highlighted by forest floor and dusky spice tones that finish with fine-grained tannins.
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.