Winemaker Notes
The wine has a bright color with nice reflections. The nose is complex, with blackberry, lilac, black pepper, tobacco leaf, forest floor and noble wood fragrance. The palate reveals a complex balance of ripe tannins, black fruits, vibrant minerality and long finale.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
A barrel sample, the 2022 Pinot Noir Founder’s Blocks is scented of cranberry, cola, potpourri and dried herbs. The medium-bodied palate is surprisingly concentrated, offering generous, spicy flavors. It's framed by finely chalky tannins and mouthwatering acidity and has a long, spicy finish.
Range: 92-94 -
Jeb Dunnuck
The 2022 Pinot Noir Founder’s Blocks comes from Yamhill-Carlton and is a youthful ruby/magenta hue. Deeper notes of sappy herbs, black raspberries, tea leaves, and sweet turned earth are followed by a medium-bodied, ripe, and structured red with broader shoulders and an earthy feel. With ripe, grippy tannins and a grounded feel (although not heavy), it’s a more serious expression and is going to drink well over the coming 15 years.
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Wine Spectator
Old World meets New in this handsomely built Pinot. Offers a backbone of minerally acidity and appealingly earthy tannins, all framed by multilayered accents of raspberry, cherry and forest floor that gather tension on the finish. Drink now through 2035.
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.