Winemaker Notes
The wine displays a mid-palate where waves of citrus fruit acidity intertwine with dark blackberry liqueur and mineral notes, remaining lifted and upright from start to finish with unrelenting precision and energy throughout.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
A bright ruby/red color, the 2023 Pinot Noir Bishop Creek opens to ripe notes of black raspberries, cherry cordial, crushed flowers, toasted cedar, and dark stones, with more forest earth as it opens. Medium-bodied, it has a ripe feel, with an approachable upfront character, fine tannins, and a silky texture. Notes of tea leaf, hints of truffle earth, and dark stones are present throughout the finish. It’s drinking well now, but it should also age gracefully over the next 10 years.
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Wine Spectator
Taut and deeply structured, with brooding black raspberry and cherry flavors that take on stony mineral, clove and other dusky spice accents as this builds toward broad-shoul- dered 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.”
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.