Winemaker Notes
Meaning "Discovery" in French and produced from the second Estate Vineyard owned by Résonance, the Découverte Vineyard Pinot Noir displays the best of the Dundee Hills AVA. Elegant yet structured, the wine is complex on the nose and palate with classic Pinot Noir aromas and flavors and a long finish.
Pairs well with lightly seasoned red meats, chicken, turkey, lamb, and root vegetables.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Effortlessly expressive and complex, with violet and cherry aromas and supple flavors accented by savory cinnamon and stony mineral. Drink now through 2023.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Pinot Noir Découverte Vineyard has a medium ruby color and scents of rhubarb, cranberries, forest floor and mushroom with touches of cinnamon stick, blackberries and black cherries. It’s medium-bodied, smoothly textured but firm, with great freshness to lift the dense finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
With production almost quadruple the previous vintage, the overall quality remains just as impressive. The nose offers baking spices and a hint of earthy tobacco, while the palate brings black cherry, with elegant herbal notes of tea and more tobacco. The tannins are proportionate and a bit drying, suggesting that this is one to cellar. Drink now–2028.
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.”
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.