Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2017 Nicolas-Jay Bishop Creek Pinot Noir is an outstanding wine. It starts with excellent energy and bite and stays long and beautifully on the palate. TASTING NOTES: This wine offers outstanding and persistent red and blue fruits, with a slightly spicy note in its aromas and flavors. Pair it with lightly-spiced, grilled lamb chops. (Tasted: May 23, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
-
James Suckling
Very attractive aromas of violet flowers and blueberries sit in a fresh array of earth and spice complexity. The palate has a sleek and fluid build with a very polished core of fresh, fine tannin. Blueberries and plums to close. A steep, close-planted, own-rooted parcel, planted in 1988.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Bishop Creek is the estate vineyard, now two decades old and coming into its prime. This is a wine to stash and savor down the road a bit. Currently it's tight and firm, lightly herbal, detailed and impeccably balanced with a mix of wild berries, citrus and soil. Drink 2022 through the rest of the decade and perhaps beyond.
Cellar Selection
-
Wine Spectator
Refined and keenly focused, with distinctive cherry and guava flavors that are laced with rose petal and savory spice accents, picking up tension and polish toward fine-grained tannins. Drink now through 2027.
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.