Winemaker Notes
The northwest corner of the Dundee Hills AVA just barely holds Guadalupe Vineyard, sitting at 425 feet above sea level at the southern end of the marine sediment of Yamhill-Carlton. Directly south-facing, the vineyard is uniquely sheltered on the north and east sides, moderating temperatures throughout the year. The result is an unusually long growing season, producing deep color and complex, savory dimension.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This offers attractive cassis and red-cherry aromas with blueberries and violet flowers, too. The palate has a super smooth, centrally focused, blue-fruit core, delivered amid silky, ribbon-like tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium ruby, the 2017 Pinot Noir Guadalupe Vineyard Clone #115 has savory scents of cured meats, dried herbs, tar, licorice and graphite over a core of red and black berries. The palate is medium-bodied and silky, offering juicy, earth and spice-laced fruits and a long, spicy finish. Well done.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Pinot Noir Guadalupe Vineyard is cut from the same cloth yet has a touch more purity in its ripe cherry and redcurrant fruits and notes of savory spices and dried herbs. Medium-bodied, elegant, and nicely textured, with terrific tannins, it too will shine for 7-8 years.
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.