Winemaker Notes
Pairs nicely with venison and fennel mashed potatoes.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Pinot Noir Terres Basses has a clean and pure bouquet with sultry blackberry and briary scents intermingling with black tea and bay leaf. It clearly needs two or three years to "unwind." The palate is medium-bodied with crunchy red and black fruit, a dash of white pepper and sage surfacing with time. It does not fan out, but remains linear and quite masculine, a little austere at the moment, but surely willing to mellow out with bottle age. Serious, introverted but cerebral Pinot.
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.