Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Beautifully fragrant, fresh and dried flowers with red and dark cherries, as well as raspberries and notes of freshly tilled earth and dark spices. The palate is beautifully detailed with a fresh, lithe and juicy array of plum and toasted-spice flavors. Long, expansive tannins. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
This reserve wine offers tones of ripe raspberry and cherry fruit, with well-defined acidity that keeps it lively and fresh. Aged in 60% new French oak, it offers notes of baking spices and toasted coconut.
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Wine Spectator
Combines richness and a keen, complex backbone, offering an expressive mix of cherry and blueberry flavors, with crushed stone and green tea accents. Drink now through 2029.
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.