Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2008 Pinot Noir Block 5 is made from Dijon clone 777. Purple in color, dense, layered, and complex, this is a brawny, masculine effort that is loaded with sweet, savory fruit. In the style of the vintage, it conceals enough ripe tannin to evolve gracefully for 5-6 years or more and will offer a drinking window extending from 2015 to 2028.
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Wine Spectator
Rich, ripe and powerful, delivering plum, orange peel and white pepper flavors over a seamless frame that jets the flavors through the long, slightly hot finish. The fruit wins in the end. Drink now through 2016. 244 cases made.
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.