Winemaker Notes
This wine with a bright garnet color reveals a delicate and complex nose of raspberry, wild strawberry and cherry flavors accented by black peppers and hints of cinnamon. The vintage and the vineyard site offers a sleek and pure expression of red fruits and minerality from the gold basalt in conjunction with a well-built and harmonious structure.
Pairs well with lightly seasoned red meats, chicken, turkey, lamb and root vegetables.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Attractive violet-like florals and a range of ripe red to darker cherry aromas here. The palate has a fresh, concentrated and gently grainy feel with a super plush and deeply juicy build to the strong and focused finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Still in the early going for Jadot's new Oregon project, this marks a step up from the previous vintage. Lushly fruity, it mixes floral aromatics with ripe red berries and cherries. A touch of cocoa powder mirrors the impact of 15 months in 30% new French oak. Barrel toast and cookie dough flavors accent the finish, which firms up with balancing acidity.
Editors' Choice -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2016 Pinot Noir Découverte Vineyard has a medium ruby-purple color and gives up tar, loamy earth and baked blackberries with red fruit sparks in the background—rhubarb, red currant—plus hints of mushroom, sweet spices and dried flowers. The palate is medium-bodied and silky with good concentration, a grainy frame and juicy freshness, finishing nuanced.
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Wine Spectator
Precise and tightly focused, but with a spirited core of minerality wrapped in densely layered cherry, slate and smoky green peppercorn flavors. Best from 2020 through 2025.
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Decanter
Glowing red plums and raked summer earth, with raspberry depths, a lovely sour cherry note, sweet liquorice and tobacco.
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.