Winemaker Notes
Boysenberry jam and blueberry pie mix with a dusting of cocoa powder dried cherry and black pepper. Firm tannins, spiced vanilla, and warm fig bring the mid-palate of this wine a sweet and savory note and a long-lasting finish.
Professional Ratings
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Penner-Ash Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir is bright, aromatic, and lasting. TASTING NOTES: This wine shows up with bright and fragrant blue fruits and stays lovely on the palate with lasting and attractive boysenberry flavors. (Tasted: May 11, 2021, San Francisco, CA)
-
James Suckling
Attractive violet and blueberry aromas here with cassis and gentle herbal accents. The palate is smooth and velvety with a plush and open-knit feel. This has ample, fleshy dark-cherry flavor. Drink now.
-
Wine Spectator
This broad-shouldered red is structured with brooding raspberry and pomegranate flavors that draw in black tea and bay leaf flavors, building tension toward medium-grained tannins. Hands off for now. Drink now.
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.