Winemaker Notes
The 2022 West Wind Pinot Noir offers notes of berries, dark chocolate, candied pistachios, vanilla extract, and honeycomb.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
A youthful red hue, the 2022 Pinot Noir West Wind Vineyard is lifted with aromas of wild, crunchy mixed berries, dark stones, peppery spice, and pine needles. Medium bodied, it has a linear feel, with ripe tannins and energetic acidity driving through the finish. A lovely wine, it’s going to age with ease over the next 10 years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Pinot Noir West Wind Vineyard comes from vines planted from 2017 to 2019 in sedimentary soils. It’s an impressive wine from young vines, offering surprising earthy, spicy complexity. It’s scented of cranberry sauce, Angostura bitters, wildflowers and woodsy tones and continues to unfurl aromatically as it airs in the glass. The medium-bodied palate features highly concentrated, detailed flavors. It’s structured by silky tannins and vibrant acidity and has a long finish with a flourish of spicy accents.
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James Suckling
Notes of red berries, spices, dried flowers and wet stone on the nose. Dry and chalky with a dusty texture to its tannins and a medium body. Juicy and savory with a refreshing finish.
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.”
Ribbon Ridge is a regular span of uplifted, marine, sedimentary soils (called Willakenzie), whose highest ridge elevations twist like a ribbon. An early settler from Missouri named Colby Carter noticed this unique topography and gave the region its name in 1865—though it wasn’t declared its own AVA until 140 years later, in 2005. The AVA is enclosed by mountains on all sides between Yamhill-Carlton and the Chehalem Mountains, and is actually part of the larger Chehalem Mountains AVA. Its soils have a finer texture than its neighbors with parent materials composed of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone. Given its presence of natural aquifers in this five square mile area, most vineyards are actually easily dry farmed!