Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
An aromatic set of rose petals, red cherries, strawberries and sweet, fresh-turned garden soil make for a nice introduction to the Kalita. Crisp acidity and fine-grained tannins provide the backdrop for dark plum, ginger and balsa flavors. Try this wine with grilled portobellos topped with marinara sauce.
Editors' Choice -
Jeb Dunnuck
A slightly hazy medium red, the 2022 Pinot Noir Kalita Vineyard takes things to a more serious level with its pure, ripe aromas of raspberry preserve, candied flowers, sweet tea leaf, and sweet spices. Supple and open, with a juicy, rounded feel, it offers ripe tannins and a kiss of sweet fruit before taking a bit of grip in the earth-noted finish.
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James Suckling
Fresh red fruit with hints of iron and anise dominates the nose. Lively flavors of red currants and raspberries highlight this medium-bodied wine, with vivid acidity and integrated tannins. A mild and pleasant finish. Drink or hold.
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.