Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2008 Pinot Noir Dundee Hills offers up a lovely nose of cedar, Asian spices, incense, cherry, and raspberry. Savory on the palate and packed with fruit, this tasty effort has enough structure to evolve for 1-2 years but can be enjoyed now and over the next 6 years.
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Wine Spectator
Light and fragrant, this is polished in texture, with a tight structure lighting a fire under the plum, spice and savory flavors, lingering easily on the refined finish. Best from 2012 through 2018.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.