Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Lots of blue fruit and flowers here, with blueberries, licorice, raspberries, mulberries and tea leaves. Both ripe and mineral, with sleek and fine tannins. Focused. This is a new cuvee made from a blend of heritage vines from Resonance Vineyard and younger vines from their newer vineyards. From organically grown grapes. Drink from 2024.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Pinot Noir Founder’s Blocks has detailed scents of blackberry jam, tea leaves, bergamot and mushrooms. The medium-bodied palate is powerful and broody with gently rustic tannins and vibrant acidity, and it has a softly flinty finish.
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Wine Spectator
Deeply structured and a bit brooding right now, this red offers precise blueberry and cherry flavors that are accented by forest floor, black tea and crushed stone notes as this gathers tension toward medium-grained tannins. Best from 2025 through 2032.
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Wine Enthusiast
An initial touch of loamy soil earthiness is followed by aromas of blackcap raspberries, leather, chalkboard dust and a touch of burnt sugar. This wine possesses brawny tannins and zippy acidity to back flavors like smoked cherries, almonds and the bitter note of a mineral water. Love the crispness of the wine's texture.
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.