Winemaker Notes
The nose opens with luscious threads of a juicy tart and baking spice, continuing on to a generosity of red fruit on the palate. Bramble and cocoa linger on the finish, echoing notes of fresh marionberry and shortbread as it fades.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Refined and generous, with sleekly layered raspberry and cherry flavors that take on notes of orange peel and baking spices, with hints of stony mineral as this builds tension toward fine-grained tannins.
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James Suckling
Raspberries, cranberries, lemon peel and tea leaves on the nose. Fresh, tangy and creamy with a medium body and fine tannins. Sleek finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
Fresh aromas of blackberry tea, sweet grape tomatoes and just-picked basil are joined by a trace of chalk and saline. A ripe, juicy blackcap raspberry flavor matches nicely with black tea and Demerara sugar notes. The wine’s acidity will put chills on the back of your neck.
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.