Winemaker Notes
The 2017 Momtazi has aromas of deep dark berry and roasted spice with hints of smoky clove, sweet tobacco and peat moss. Roasted eastern spices, dried blueberry and blackberry fruit flavors stream across your mouth and carry into an extended finish of complex blue fruit and sweet spice. It is remarkable that this level of concentration is seamlessly integrated.
Pair with braised meats, roasts, mushroom or dishes with eastern spices.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Lots of black-fruit aromas, together with walnuts, dried meat and dried earth follow through to a full body with soft, juicy tannins and succulent fruit and chocolate. Flavorful finish. Give this time to open. Try after 2022.
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.”
Stretching southwest from the city of McMinnville, the AVA with the same name covers about 40,000 acres across 20 miles until it meets the Van Duzer Corridor. This corridor is the only break in the Coast Range whose gap allows the cool Pacific Ocean air to flow eastward into the Willamette Valley.
The Pacific's moderating winds hit McMinnville’s south and southeast facing slopes where cool-climate varieties—namely Pinot noir and Pinot blanc thrive on ridges at between 200 to 1,000 feet in elevation.
Soils here are primarily uplifted marine sedimentary loam and silt, with alluvial formations; McMinnville receives less rainfall than its neighbors to the east because it is situated in the rain shadow of the Coast Range.