Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Textural and beautifully detailed, this offers front-loaded flavors of cola, cocoa, graphite and tobacco, wrapped around blackberry and black-cherry fruits. Despite the relatively steep alcohol, this drinks in a lighter, more elegant, yet quite showy style.
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Wine Spectator
Piquant and savory aromas of smoky sage and dark berry lead to structured flavors that finish with bright, stony minerality. Drink now through 2021.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.