Winemaker Notes
Best served with rich dishes, it is a great match for steak, lamb, rich pasta dishes. Enjoy over the next dozen years.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
There's a lushness to this warmly fruity vineyard selection, that wraps the mixed red-berry fruit in a blanket of milk chocolate. Hints of mint and fresh herb strike a bright note as well, and the finish suggests that another year or two of bottle age will bring out still more complexity. Drink 2018 through 2028.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 Pinot Noir Freedom Hill Vineyard has more complexity on the nose compared to the 2013 with better mineralité and tension. The fruit is very clean and precise with redcurrant and crushed strawberry scents unfurling from the glass. The palate is medium-bodied with undergrowth-tinged red berry fruit, a touch of bitter cherry lending tension, a keen thread of acidity (apparently this has the lowest pH) with a dash of spice on the aftertaste.
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.”
Running north to south, adjacent to the Willamette River, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA has shallow and well-drained soils created from ancient lava flows (called Jory), marine sediments, rocks and alluvial deposits. These soils force vine roots to dig deep, producing small grapes with great concentration.
Like in the McMinnville sub-AVA, cold Pacific air streams in via the Van Duzer Corridor and assists the maintenance of higher acidity in its grapes. This great concentration, combined with marked acidity, give the Eola-Amity Hills wines—namely Pinot noir—their distinct character. While the region covers 40,000 acres, no more than 1,400 acres are covered in vine.