Winemaker Notes
The nose is a lovely mixture of black cherry, raspberry, and wild strawberry scent. Allspice and Vietnamese cinnamon seamlessly intertwine with hints of mace. The mouth surprises you with the fullness of spicy dark red fruit and lush, juicy acidity that slowly morphs into dried cherry and allspice flavors.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is a testament to what happens when you match fruit from a great vineyard with a skilled winemaking hand. Raspberries, lilacs and blueberry honey form an aromatic Justice League, followed by similar flavors of raspberries, cacao nibs and lavender tea. The wine’s acidity is still kicking, which is what you will be doing to yourself if you don’t buy some.
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James Suckling
Cherries, dried strawberries, rose hips and oyster shells on the nose. Some lemon peel. It’s medium-bodied, tight and refined, with relatively firm tannins and a more mineral finish. Let it open. Drink from 2024.
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Wine & Spirits
Mark Vlossak has been drawing from Temperance Hill vineyard since 1994. His latest bottling is light and glossy, with a lifted red-cherry scent and a fine, toffee’d caramel note. With air, spice and tobacco flavors fill in the broad middle palate, only to tighten up nicely with the typical tannic firmness of the site. Give it some cellar time to allow those tannins to integrate.
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Wine Spectator
Precise and well-knit, with deep flavors of cherry and guava highlighted by earthy mineral and black tea notes as this builds tension toward medium-grained tannins. Drink now through 2030. 777 cases made.
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.