Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The medium ruby-colored 2008 Pinot Noir Savoia displays an ethereal perfume of cedar, spice box, rose petal, and assorted red fruits. Leaner and racier on the palate than its peers, this is an elegantly styled effort with impeccable balance and a lengthy, seamless finish.
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Wine Spectator
Supple, open-textured and inviting, letting its plum, currant and sweet spice flavors float easily through the refined texture, hovering over the long, delicate finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
The Savoya Pinot Noir displays excellent concentration and grip and its raspberry/cherry fruit gives it a tart, racy flair. There's an herbal edge to the tannins, but overall this is very well crafted, balanced and built for medium-term cellaring.
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.