Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Has presence and depth in a deftly balanced package, playing the cherry, clotted cream and floral flavors against fine tannins and an open texture, finishing with finesse. Drink now through 2022. 600 cases made.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
Delicious and generous, the well-balanced 2014 Purple Hands Latchkey Pinot Noir exemplifies the excellence of the famed Dundee Hills AVA—Pioneer David Lett planted the area's first Pinot Noir in 1965. The wines are rich yet elegant in style. This wine offers raspberry and blueberry flavors, bright acidity, and light earth notes in the finish. Drinks nicely now. (Tasted: December 12, 2016, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Enthusiast
Forward and open, this has chocolaty, brambly raspberry fruit, along with pleasant hints of tobacco, vanilla and caramel. It glides through the palate smoothly, finishing with an elegant touch of stem, from 15% whole cluster fermentation.
Purple Hands Vineyards celebrates site-specific pinot noir and chardonnay that unearth the Willamette Valley’s long evolutionary history. Using traditional winemaking techniques, they strive to produce wines that convey an honest expression of each of their vineyards—its grapevines and cultivation, soil and stone, sunshine and rain. All of their wines undergo native fermentation and remain unfined and unfiltered at bottling to preserve their natural, wild character. Achieving elegance in this pursuit is the passion and art of their craft.
Over the past 40 years, Cody’s family has created a legacy of quality in the Oregon wine industry. Their winemaking styles and techniques helped Oregon’s Willamette Valley become the premium Pinot noir producing region in the world. At Purple Hands, Cody continues to build on the standard of excellence initiated by the previous generation.
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.