Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This has a strawberry accent on the nose that makes for a very bright, fresh and focused impression. The palate is super elegant and has a very plush, fine and detailed texture with long and fresh fruit persistence.
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Wine Enthusiast
The winery's biggest production Pinot Noir is a gem, with grip, tension and power. Black fruits etched with iron ore and graphite, along with a touch of black olive, make this smooth and supple wine a joy to explore. The tannins are ripe and very lightly earthy. It's delicious the instant you pull the cork, so don't wait.
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Wine Spectator
Tightly focused and well-built, with medium-bodied black cherry, green tea and smoky cardamom flavors that finish with refined tannins. Drink now through 2023.
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.