Winemaker Notes
Hopewell Hills, like its next door neighbor “Gathered Stones”, is all about bubbles and crystals. Smaller and finer bubbles and crystals produce a wine that is somewhat softer than “Gathered Stones". With fruit driven energy that illuminates in waves coursing through the wine. The same fruit profile as Gathered Stones but with slightly more placid energy. Polished and layered, with vibrant black raspberry, savory bay leaf and crushed rock accents that build toward refined tannins.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Super complex with pine needles, bark, mushrooms, blackberries, dried strawberries and pumice. Full and very layered with tightly wound tannins with chalky texture and a juicy finish. Ethereal forest flower nature to it. One for the cellar.
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Wine & Spirits
Hopewell Hills is a shallow-soiled fragment of fractured-stone in the basalt structure of the Eola Hills. In 2018, it produced a wine like no other I’ve ever tasted from Oregon. It has a vigorous spiciness when first poured, a series of reductive aromas of tar and rail ties and oil that fall away one by one, revealing, by day two, a wine of stunning complexity and fulsome flavor. That industrial savor becomes a background the fruit rests on like a dancer on a stage. By day three, the wine’s aromas are explosive, reminiscent of a spice bazaar—cardamom, ginger, chai and cacao, all wound around expansive, pure cherry fruit. A bravura performance.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2018 Pinot Noir Hopewell Hills Gathered Stones is highly perfumed with baked cherry, pine, and medicinal herbs, while the palate is dry with dusty, chalky tannins and lots of resinous depth of fruit, including notes of red plum, baking spice, tea leaf, and leather.
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.