Winemaker Notes
Matteri Vineyard surveys commanding vistas of the surrounding countryside from its gently rolling, South-facing slopes. Dry and windswept at 550 feet, clones 115 and 777 do battle with the elements to produce tiny berries with powerful richness and intense flavor.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
I loved the 2017 Pinot Noir Matteri Vineyard and this beauty comes all from clone 777 and was mostly destemmed (80%) and is still aging in 40% new French oak. It’s fresh, focused, and medium-bodied, with exotic notes of orange blossom, dried flowers, raspberries, peach pit, and spice. It’s certainly the most complex and layered in the lineup and blossoms with time in the glass.
Rating: 93-95
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James Suckling
A very foresty nose with wild herbs, flowers, leaves and bracken, wrapped into dried red-cherry aromas. The palate has a very composed shape and pleasantly sinewy tannins are thrust forward in the mix. Supple and smoothly resolved at the finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Matteri Vineyard Clone #115/777 has reticent scents of violet, dried flowers and dusty earth with a core of red and black berries. Medium-bodied, it's silky, juicy and delicate, finishing long.
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.