Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2013 Pinot Noir Pommard Clone has a very attractive bouquet with red plum and cranberry scents, touches of Autumn leaves that ebb away and offer lovely minty scents. The palate is medium-bodied with tart red cherries on the entry, lovely saline notes here with a brisk blackberry and cranberry finish that tapers ever so slightly, but that still does not detract from this very well-crafted Pinot full of charm and breeding. And yeah...it does have semblances to Pommard in the Côte d'Or!
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Wine Enthusiast
The Pommard clone gives a distinctive taste of breakfast tea to the wine, with fresh raspberry fruit and a lick of lemon. It's nicely astringent but smooth and well structured, with light touches of frangipane.
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.