Winemaker Notes
Aromas of sweet leather, rose petal and plum fill the senses before even taking a sip. On the palate, notes of fresh fig, vanilla, and pastry dough take over while the fine grain tannins and suppleness of this wine create a well-balanced finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Very spicy and intense, this complex pinot shows blueberry and dark-cherry aromas, as well as some sappy notes, roses and forest wood. The palate is weighty with plenty of ripe fruit flesh. Quite supple and velvety with flavors that run from red to dark cherries. Flavorful finish.
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Wine Spectator
Refined and structured, this red is enveloped in supple, multilayered cherry and raspberry flavors that pull in orange blossom and spiced tea accents, unfolding toward refined tannins. Drink now through 2028.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby, the 2018 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard opens with delicate notions of charcuterie, aniseed, forest floor and dried blackberries, offering up more nuance with time as it sits in the glass. The medium-bodied palate is firm and juicy, with broody, earthy fruits and loads of energetic lift, finishing long and savory.
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.