Winemaker Notes
Pair with cedar plank grilled salmon with tarragon aioli pulled pork with cherry chutney and pickled onions, creamed morel mushrooms with shallots and hard cheeses, especially Comté.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Here's reserve-level quality in a widely available, moderately priced bottle. It's entirely estate grown, ripe with bright cherry fruit, and a finish that resonates with granite and earth.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
A formidable wine, the 2014 Stoller Family Estate Pinot Noir offers a complete look at why the state of Oregon is one of the leading viticultural areas for this fickle grape variety. This wine shows earth, licorice, red and black fruits, and exotic five-spice—a mixture of star anise, cloves, cinnamon, and Sichuan pepper. This looks like a good match with five-spice chicken. Drinking well now. (Tasted: June 22, 2016, San Francisco, CA)
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Tasting Panel
Bright, smooth and juicy with tangy cherry fruit and racy style; silky and fresh, balanced and long
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Wine & Spirits
Oak-centered aromas of graham crackers and caramel lead in this posh Pinot Noir, the wood framing lush dark plum flavors. Its plump texture is irresistible, and a good match with pork loin. Best Buy.
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.