Winemaker Notes
The 2021 Estate Pinot Noir displays an exuberant nose of strawberry and black raspberry interlaced with lavender, crushed stone, cardamom, and bergamot. It’s a seamless wine, with gathering energy on the palate that gives rise to a core of blue and black fruit along with a lively flourish of minerality and sweet tobacco on the finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is so attractive and fresh with dark cherries, crushed blueberries, hints of violets, dried pomegranate skins and crushed stones. Delicate and silky on the palate with polished, refined tannins and pure red and blue fruit character, seasoned with some spicy herbs. Textured and lingering. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
Blackcap raspberries are joined by powerful floral aromas of phlox and jasmine. Rich blueberry and dark plum flavors coat the palate, followed by bursts of black tea and orange zest. Bright acidity matches up with silky tannins. I think I have a new pork chop pairing.
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Wine Spectator
Generous and refined, with multilayered raspberry and cherry flavors accented by cinnamon and other brown spices. Builds richness toward polished tannins.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.