Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Here is a vivid wine with wonderful aromatics of fresh strawberry and lemon undertones. Full-bodied, tight and polished with intense undertones. Long and racy. Better in 2019.
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Wine Enthusiast
A varied mix of fruits—citrus, apple, raspberry and cherry—accompany this wine's tannic note of breakfast tea. It's a bit on the astringent side, with a dollop of nougat and almond paste adding nice highlights through the finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale to medium ruby-purple, the 2014 Pinot Noir Pommard Clone has expressive Bing cherries, warm cranberries and Provence herbs notes on the nose with a waft of underbrush. Medium-bodied with plenty of perfumed fruit and great freshness in the mouth, it has a solid frame of fine grained tannins, and it finishes with great vibrancy.
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.