Winemaker Notes
This 100% bio-dynamic hand harvested, single vineyard Pinot Noir is aged and fermented completely in Stainless steel and concrete egg. The wine shows bright raspberry, strawberry jam, with rose petals, violets, and a light component of baking bread. The wine is extremely vibrant with a light, glassy, soft , and smooth mid-palate. The light tannin cradles the wine and lends itself to the refreshing acidity with a long, jam influenced finish.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
All wines from 2016 had been bottled on January 22, 2017, and I tasted the whole range with one of the partners, Julio Donoso three weeks after the bottling. We started with the 2016 Refugio Pinot Noir, which is pure Pinot Noir from red soils rich in clay and granite in Casablanca, fermented with indigenous yeasts and kept in egg-shaped cement vats until bottling. This is very fresh, focused and complex even if it's still so obviously young. The grapes were harvested extremely early, 17 days earlier than their first vintage (2010) even considering the year was cooler and later ripening. It's very tasty and elegant, with symmetry and chiseled flavors. It was not dizzy despite the recent bottling. 16,000 bottles produced.
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.”
A region that has become synonymous with some of the best whites of Chile, the Casablanca Valley is full of dozens of bodegas who either grow fruit here or come from outside to source from local growers for their own white wine programs. The valley runs from east to west, which means that its westernmost vineyards receive the most cooling influence from the reliable afternoon sea breezes. The soils also tend to be heavier in clay in the west, whereas the eastern end of the valley is warmer and its soils are predominantly granitic. Sauvignon blanc thrives here, Chardonnay does well and Pinot noir is not uncommon.