Winemaker Notes
Pairs nicely with grilled salmon or pork tenderloin.
Blend: 100% Pinot Noir
Professional Ratings
-
Wine Enthusiast
A light, pretty rose color, this comes out with a burst of raspberries and roses, highlighted with a lick of chocolate. The back end shows some phenolic punch, putting a tight wrap on an elegant wine with the ability to improve through 2020 at least.
-
Wine Spectator
Distinctive, spicy, complex and inviting, featuring a curled-up ball of blackberry, cherry, Earl Grey tea and spice flavors, pushing against refined tannins into a long and reverberating finish. Best from 2017 through 2022.
-
Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
The character of this wine really comes through as it shows excellent and tightly-knit varietal notes, the 2012 WillaKenzie Estate Kiana Pinot Noir brings its varietal class to the fore; red fruit, savory herbs and firsky chalk notes begin from start to finish. A lovely wine with lots to offer. (Tasted: March 10, 2015, San Francisco, CA)
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.