Winemaker Notes
This wine expresses river stone and black raspberry aromas and refined, layered cherry, black tea and savory spice flavors.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Graceful and seamlessly complex, with multilayered cherry and blueberry flavors that take on river stone and spiced tea accents, building tension toward fine-grained tannins.
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James Suckling
Plenty of tar, spice, pumice, cumin and dark chocolate. Some dried strawberries. Medium body. Layered and opened tannins. Slate and flint at the end. Very cool character for a hot vintage.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Hopewell Hills—Gathered Stones comes from a particular piece of the Hopewell Hills vineyard. Medium ruby-purple, it opens with tar and scorched earth notes over a core of blackberries, black cherries, smoked cranberries and baked rhubarb with accents of orange peel, dried roses, tea leaves and bitters. The palate is medium-bodied, super silky and intense, unfurling to layers of fruits, spices and citrus with earthy touches. It has a firm but ripe frame and seamless freshness on the long, nuanced finish. Lovely! Make sure to decant this or give it another year or two in bottle.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.