Winemaker Notes
This nose explodes with spiced chocolate, cayenne, sweet paprika and cracked black pepper mingled with anise, hazelnut and pomegranate syrup. The mouth is broad and expansive with notes of clove, nutmeg, German chocolate cake and vanilla. The soft, plush tannins linger with a touch of cinnamon.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from deeper basalt soils, brilliant aromas emerge from the 2019 Pinot Noir Reserve, which offers up notes of red cherry liqueur, crushed roses, and well-balanced oak spices. Medium to full-bodied, it captures wonderful freshness, with ripe tannins, a focused, more linear mouthfeel, and a spicy, fresh finish.
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James Suckling
Blackberry, dried strawberry and spice. Some flint and asphalt and even graphite. Full-bodied and layered with dark fruit and a fine and firm tannin structure that goes very long.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Pinot Noir Reserve Laurelwood District comes from own-rooted old vines planted in the 1970s and 1980s. It has savory aromas of cranberry jelly, licorice, burnt orange peel, forest floor, tea leaves and conifer. The medium-bodied palate is bursting with juicy fruit supported by finely grained tannins, and it has a long, spicy finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
A stunning combination of brisk acidity, silky tannins and voluminous fruit begins with aromas of blackberry jam, coriander, cedar and a trace of vanilla. Black cherries and dark plum fruit flavors form a ball around a core of orange pekoe tea and milk chocolate. A full, rich mouthfeel only heightens the wine's sense of delightful decadence.
Editors' Choice -
Wine Spectator
Grace meets structure with this Pinot, which offers blueberry and raspberry flavors that show accents of bramble and savory spices, building richness and tension toward refined tannins.
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Wine & Spirits
A reductive scent of sawdust and creosote leads, though only one day later the scent of the wine is translucent and lifted. The red-strawberry flavors are almost as rich as jam, with tobacco savor on the back end, the oak providing a cushiony, burnished elegance. It has the flesh for a wagyu burger.
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.”
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.