Winemaker Notes
A bejeweled glassful of garnets, Asha snakes onto your palate with Amarena cherries, clove, and a tantalizing wisp of distant campfire. Elegant, slippery tannins sway to a tune played on vanilla violins.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has a reductive edge with quite cryptic aromas of tarry, spicy black fruit. The palate has a taut, powerful feel with a silky edge to the dense, long tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Pinot Noir Asha Momtazi Vineyard is pale to medium ruby in color with a pretty nose of granite, rose petal, tobacco leaf and licorice over a core of sweet red and black cherries and berries. The palate offers good concentration of red and black fruits laced with spice and framed by soft, grainy tannins, with mouthwatering acidity and a long nuanced 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.”
Stretching southwest from the city of McMinnville, the AVA with the same name covers about 40,000 acres across 20 miles until it meets the Van Duzer Corridor. This corridor is the only break in the Coast Range whose gap allows the cool Pacific Ocean air to flow eastward into the Willamette Valley.
The Pacific's moderating winds hit McMinnville’s south and southeast facing slopes where cool-climate varieties—namely Pinot noir and Pinot blanc thrive on ridges at between 200 to 1,000 feet in elevation.
Soils here are primarily uplifted marine sedimentary loam and silt, with alluvial formations; McMinnville receives less rainfall than its neighbors to the east because it is situated in the rain shadow of the Coast Range.