Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2008 Pinot Noir McCrone Vineyard comes from a densely spaced site planted in 1992. It offers up fragrant black fruit aromas verging into blueberry and plum. Mouth-coating on the palate with plenty of structure and intense flavors, it has outstanding volume, focus, and length. Give it 3-4 years of cellaring and drink it through 2023.
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Wine Spectator
Silky, supple and distinctive for the deep mineral flavors that weave through dark berry, cherry and currant fruit, sailing easily into a cloud of fine tannins on the long, expressive finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Still quite young, but showing real depth and layering, the McCrone vineyard designate offers pomegranate and raspberry fruit, dusted with baking spices, and finished with a tasty vein of mocha. This is a wine to enjoy in the full bloom of its youth.
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.”
Yamhill-Carlton, characterized by pastoral, rolling hills composed of shallow, quick-draining, ancient marine soil, is ideal for Pinot noir and other cool-climate-loving varieties. It is in the rain shadow of the Coast Range to its west, whose highest point climbs to an altitude of 3,500 feet. Yamhill-Carlton is actually surrounded by mountains on three sides: Chehalem Mountains to the north, the Dundee Hills to the east and the western Coast Range to its west, which, when it lets Pacific air through, serves to cool the region.
Vineyards grow on the ridges surrounding the two small communities of Yamhill and Carlton and cover about 1,200 acres of this 60,000 acre region, which roughly makes a horse-shoe shape on a map.