Winemaker Notes
The Shea Vineyard Pinot Noir is floral and spice focused. The wine has a seamless palate weight with red and blue fruits, including anise, cola, raspberry and black cherry.
Ken Wright Cellars is devoted to showcasing the inherent quality of selected vineyard sites. With a clarity and breadth that is unequaled by other varieties, we believe Pinot noir best expresses the character of these sites. Rather than stamping wine with a varietal trademark, Pinot noir is the ultimate vehicle for conveying the aroma, flavor and texture of the location in which it is grown. Ken Wright Cellars produces a single vineyard Pinot Noir from 13 different vineyard sites in the Northern Willamette Valley.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The Shea hits a home run in 2016, with superb concentration and palate power. Sweet spices adorn a wine with ripe fruit flavors that cascade from blackberry and cherry into apple-raisin pie. There’s even a touch of candied citrus. It’s not a sweet wine, but the tremendous fruit ripeness conveys that impression.
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James Suckling
This has attractive aromas of fresh red cherries and pomegranate with a palate that delivers good clarity of fine tannin and fresh red-cherry flavors. The freshness and depth here sets this apart in the Ken Wright range of 2016s. This is the pick. Drink or hold. Synthetic cork.
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.