Winemaker Notes
Pair with: Tea-smoked duck breast with cherry reduction soy and ginger marinated tri tip roast baked ham with cranberry glaze.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A gorgeous Shea bottling, this is lushly aromatic and fruited with strawberry jam, blueberry and cherry. The fruit is set against clean acids and supple tannins, and flavors remain full and focused with details of baking spices all through the long finish. This is a thoroughly delicious example of the power and pleasure of the 2014 vintage in the Willamette Valley.
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James Suckling
A red with layers of tannins and dried-fruit character Very structured. Yet there's a vibrance to this red that gives it tension and focus. Quite tannic now. Better in 2019.
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.