Winemaker Notes
Notes of spiced earth, sandalwood, violet and tea leaf give way to vanilla, spiced plum, and caramelized brown sugar. The entry shows a lushness with
dusty tannin, charred raspberry, and black pepper followed by a lengthy and velvety finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Graceful and elegantly structured, with pretty raspberry, stony mineral and tea accents that gather richness and backbone on a long finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple, the 2017 Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills offers smoked meats, roasted cranberries, blackberries, saline, tea leaves and dusty earth aromas. Medium-bodied, silky, concentrated and spicy, it has a grainy frame and juicy freshness with pure, crunchy fruits, finishing long and spiced.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.