Winemaker Notes
Floral and spice focused. Fresh and bright red fruit- red plum and cranberry mingle with notes and cinnamon, tobacco and turned earth.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2016 Pinot Noir Savoya Vineyard is ripe and dark fruited, with black cherry, leather, dried violets, and wooded earth. The palate is fresh with black raspberry, cedar, and mineral earth. I initially thought the aromas were a little more developed, but the palate has great freshness and tension.
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Wine Enthusiast
The Savoya feels a little lighter than it did in past vintages, with a pretty mix of strawberry and cherry candy fruit flavors. The tannins add a bit of muscle and stiffen up the finish.
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.