Winemaker Notes
This approachable Pinot covers all the bases. Generous fruit, with black cherry, raspberry, blackberry, plum, and black currant, play beautifully with its slightly more serious side of sweet smoke, forest floor, and cracked black pepper. Well-integrated fine tannins and a long finish make this the ideal dinner or party wine.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
A blend from all the different types of elevation sites, clones, and soils, the 2015 Pinot Noir Jamsheed pours a medium pristine ruby and jumps from the glass with poppy notes of mixed red fruits, raspberry coulis, candied roses, spice, and cardamom. The palate is elegant and silky in texture, with medium body, fine tannins, and a long, clean finish.
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James Suckling
Lovely aromas of ripe red fruit, dark chocolate and rosemary. Medium-bodied with soft, powdery tannins. Bright acidity and juicy red fruit are complimented by white pepper and thyme.
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Wine & Spirits
Bottle age has lent some elegance to this wine; its secondary aromatics lead with tobacco, smoke, mushroom and pine tips all mingling with suave refinement. A burst of dark red-cherry fruit pushes through the savor, the burnished tannins ready for pan-roasted trout.
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Wine Spectator
Silky and approachable, with delicate raspberry, orange peel and spiced cinnamon flavors
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.