Winemaker Notes
Deep Pinot Noir aromas of red fruit and wood highlight the nose, while the palate is delicate and long with balanced fruit and tannins.
Pairs well with lightly seasoned red meats, chicken, turkey, lamb and root vegetables.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Fragrant notes of lavender, fresh and sour cherries, licorice, potpourri and nutmeg. Medium-bodied with creamy, velvety tannins. Open, spicy and energetic. Made from older vines in the Decouverte vineyard. From organically grown grapes. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Pinot Noir Découverte Vineyard has expressive aromas of red cherry, cranberry, lavender, bitters and fennel. The light-bodied palate is bright and delicately styled with lacy tannins, nuanced flavors and a long, spicy finish. It opens dramatically with air and will benefit from an hour in a decanter.
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Wine Spectator
Handsomely built and dynamic, this Pinot offers raspberry and cherry flavors framed by stony minerality and forest floor tones while building tension toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2032.
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Wine Enthusiast
Lighter in body, this Pinot Noir is graced by electrifying acidity, tart red cherry, green tea and clove flavors, and a long finish. The wine's aromas are earthy, with loamy soil uniting with blackberries, pine needles and grilled portobello mushrooms.
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.