Winemaker Notes
An especially beautiful nose introduces you to the 2015 Pinot noir Shea Vineyard. Elegant cassis, white pepper, red rose and spicecake aromas swirl around your first glimpse of this lovely wine. Luscious concentrated red berry fruits rush across your palate followed by complex dark floral, forest floor and dried cherry notes. This is not your normally subdued Pinot noir from Shea, but a wonderfully intergrated voluptuous expression from this great site. The dark berry and floral flavors balance with ripe tannins and soft acidity slowly fading into your next sip. Certaily a WOW wine from this famous vineyard! It can clearly be enjoyed now and over the next 15 years. Match with food.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Packed with black fruits, berry and cherry, this bursts open beautifully, buoyed by juicy acids. It's full bodied and almost irresistible, though it surely has the potential to age for another decade or longer. Drink now or hold; either way it's a winner.
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Wine & Spirits
From Yamhill-Carlton’s most iconic vineyard, this pinot is lighter than many from Shea. With ethereal red-cherry scents and hint of wild herbs, it smells weighty, like a red fruit compote. The wine seems to hover after each sip, juicy, lifted and poised, with lacy elegance, to work with something wild, like grilled porcini.
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Wine Spectator
Sleek and spirited, with floral cherry and black tea aromas and layered plum, savory cinnamon and spice flavors that finish with refined tannins. Drink now through 2023.
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.