Winemaker Notes
Purple Hands Shea Vineyard Pinot Noir offers notes of mulberry, boysenberry, cocoa nibs, cinnamon, clove, clotted cream, coffee, toasted vanilla, fruit leather, and golden delicious apple.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from WillaKenzie soils in Yamhill-Carlton, the 2023 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard is all 777 clone and pours a youthful ruby red color. It’s another highly expressive wine with wild berries and wild herbs taking charge, with juniper, saddle leather, and very pretty notes of wild raspberries starting to shine through and take the lead as it opens. Medium-bodied, this wine exhibits a refined texture with fine tannins, refreshing acidity, and a mouthwatering finish.
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James Suckling
Enticing aromas of pomegranates and dried spices, such as cinnamon and cardamom waft from the glass, together with lavender, toasted orange peel, purple plums and licorice. It’s medium-bodied, spicy and concentrated, but cool and lightweight at the same time, with silky tannins and a long, supple finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard opens with savory tones of flint, iron and leather that slowly give way to scents of red cherry, blackberry, bergamot and violet. The full-bodied palate has concentrated, spicy flavors. It’s structured by chalky tannins and mouthwatering acidity and has a long, layered finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
It is challenging to resist an aroma that conjures memories of a boysenberry pie cooling on my grandmother's kitchen counter. The fruit is joined by additional aromas of violets, duff and cedar. These tannins ripple and flex like the muscles of a black panther. They prowl in support of tart mulberry, sweet Tahitian vanilla and espresso flavors. Enjoy this wine now until 2036.
Cellar Selection -
Vinous
The 2023 Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard is decidedly dark and brooding, mixing crushed violets with licorice tones, cola and blackberries. Ripe red and black fruits sweep across the palate, guided by fresh acidity as a subtle mineral inflection forms toward the close. A web of fine tannins adds youthful poise and a tinge of tart raspberry and citrus leaves the senses salivating.
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Wine Spectator
Tightly focused and densely structured, with deep flavors of blueberry and cherry highlighted by dusky spices and black tea as this gathers tension and tannins on the firm finish. Best from 2026 through 2033.
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.”
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.