Winemaker Notes
A near perfect growing season, with plentiful yields and slow ripening fruit, carried us into a gorgeous harvest. The weather allowed them to take time with their picking decisions and choose perfectly ripe fruit. The result is a vintage with fresh, vibrant energy and a long, graceful, healthy life ahead.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Beautifully deep, blueberries and plums on offer with notes of fresh violets and moist, fresh-tilled earth. This is full of life and very pure. The palate has focused and fresh tannins that sit in very vibrant style with a deep push of concentrated blue fruit, holding the finish in superb style. So fresh and long, this will age well. Drink across the next decade or more.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Sequitur Pinot Noir is maturing gracefully. It has inviting aromas of cranberry, blackberry, lichen, shiitake mushroom and mint. The full-bodied palate offers youthful fruit and is just beginning to reveal more savory character. It’s framed by fine, chalky tannins and bright acidity and has a long, nuanced finish. It hasn’t yet reached a peak. Rating: 93+
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Wine Enthusiast
Sourced from Mike Etzel's vineyard above Beaux Frères, this brings nuanced flavors with notes of seashells and minerals along with plump blackberry fruit. It's elegant and detailed, but needs decanting or several hours of aeration to open up fully.
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Wine Spectator
Dynamic yet tightly wound, with complex cherry, stony mineral and orange peel flavors that build tension and tannins on the finish. Drink now through 2028.
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Wine & Spirits
From a sedimentary site in the Ribbon Ridge district, this wine leads with dark scents of smoke and black-cherry cola. The flavors are red fruited and sleek, with notes of lees and lavender that lend complexity. It’s a stalwart pinot for smoked chicken.
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.”
Ribbon Ridge is a regular span of uplifted, marine, sedimentary soils (called Willakenzie), whose highest ridge elevations twist like a ribbon. An early settler from Missouri named Colby Carter noticed this unique topography and gave the region its name in 1865—though it wasn’t declared its own AVA until 140 years later, in 2005. The AVA is enclosed by mountains on all sides between Yamhill-Carlton and the Chehalem Mountains, and is actually part of the larger Chehalem Mountains AVA. Its soils have a finer texture than its neighbors with parent materials composed of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone. Given its presence of natural aquifers in this five square mile area, most vineyards are actually easily dry farmed!