Winemaker Notes
The wine reflects a beautiful and brilliant garnet color, with an expressive and complex nose of strawberry, plum, wild cherry, almond and licorice. The wine reveals an elegant palate, vibrant and complex, with delicate notes of noble wood, and very long and mineral finale.
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
Lots of fresh cherries and strawberries on the nose, as well as bark, dried mushroom and citrus peel. It’s medium-bodied and juicy with silky tannins. Some serious, earthy undertones to the red-fruit flavors. Drink or hold.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Matured in barrel for 17 months, the 2018 Pinot Noir Découverte Vineyard has delicate scents of cranberries, blackberries and tea leaves with earthy undertones. The light-bodied palate is grainy and fresh with concentrated, earthy fruit and a long, layered finish.
-
Wine Spectator
Filled with tension and presence but showing rather tight at the moment. Floral cherry and pomegranate flavors combine with green tea and steely minerality and build toward firm tannins. Needs time. Best from 2022 through 2028.
-
Wine Enthusiast
The aromas bring a whiff of leather and compost, along with hints of spicy red plum. The spicy character rings across the palate, along with stiff herbal tannins that bring notes of black coffee, smoke and tar. There are black fruits buried in here, though it may take aggressive aeration to lift them out. Further bottle age is recommended.
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.