Winemaker Notes
The 2023 Purple Hands Latchkey Vineyard Pinot Noir offers notes of cotton candy, rose petal, wild flower, raspberry sherbet, cherry sorbet, black cherry, eucalyptus, flower, honey, and tobacco.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from Pommard vines planted in 2006, the 2023 Pinot Noir Latchkey Vineyard is a deeper ruby color and was aged for 11 months in 25% new French oak and 25% whole cluster. (This is the same for all the vineyard designates.) In the glass, it opens to resinous notes of wildflowers, graphite, black raspberries, polished leather, and forest earth. This is a great vintage of this wine, with ripe tannins and an expansive yet detailed feel throughout. It has a gravelly texture, snappy freshness with crunchy berry fruit. Rating: 96+
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pinot Noir Latchkey Vineyard comes from 20-year-old Pommard vines planted in Jory soils. Fermented with 25% whole clusters and matured in 25% new oak, it has slowly unfurling scents of blackberry, rhubarb, Earl Grey tea, damp earth and lichen. The full-bodied palate is concentrated and succulent with layer after layer of lip-smacking berry fruit. It’s framed by refined, velvety tannins and has a long, expressive finish.
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James Suckling
Purple plums, sandalwood, spice box and peach tea on the nose of this fragrant red. It’s medium-bodied with excellent depth and concentration. Firm and chalky tannin frame. Rich and expressive.
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Wine Enthusiast
These Latchkey vines are no longer kids as they approach the 20-year mark. The wines this producer makes with the fruit improve as the vineyard matures. This year's model opens with notes of black cherry, dark plum and barbecue short ribs. Dark raspberry and sage flavors are flanked by a trace of black tea. This is a nicely balanced wine with a luxurious mouthfeel and velvety tannins.
Editors' Choice -
Wine Spectator
Sinewy and slightly brooding but buoyed but multilayered raspberry and guava flavors that take on blood orange and dusky spice accents as this builds tension toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2033. 599 cases made.
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.