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 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
Scents of tea, sassafras and tart cherry open the way to a bright palate.
Air this out and it brings up hints of umami and truffle, leading into an elegant and detailed finish with a dash of allspice. It’s a distinctive and unique expression of this iconic vineyard. Drink through 2030. Cellar Selection.
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Wine Spectator
Sumptuous and precise, this wine is structured and expressive, featuring detailed raspberry and cherry flavors, laced with blood orange and spiced tea accents. Drink now through 2028.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: One the beauties of Oregon Pinot Noirs are the wines' elegance. The 2017 Ken Wright Shea Vineyard is an excellent sample of style and balance. TASTING NOTES: This wine is rich, yet quite balanced. Its aromas and flavors of red fruits, black fruits, and bright minerality should pair it famously with a grilled salmon fillet. (Tasted: February 12, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
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.