Winemaker Notes
Pair with classic Pinot-friendly dishes like Pacific Northwest salmon, or wild foraged chanterelle risotto.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
With its slightly floral scent and dark red cherry flavors, this pinot from Yamhill-Carlton’s best-known vineyard holds surprising freshness and detail. Acidity drives the finish, which lasts with sweet persistence. It’s got the energy to stand up to roast pork.
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Wine Enthusiast
Tight, tart raspberry fruit is immediately juicy and inviting, set atop a crisp and refreshing mineral base. The concentration is impressive, and this seems likely to age well over the next decade. Drink now through 2025.
Cellar Selection.
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.