Available only to members of our Collectors Club. Contact the winery for details.
With heaps of fruit on the nose, this wine bursts from the glass with aromas of cherry and blackberry compote. The broad, rounded palate has even more cherry, balanced by a cinnamon stick spice that leads into notes of forest floor, vanilla and cedar.
VINTAGE 2023 required experience and patience that was rewarded with essential hang-time and ripening. The growing season started cool, then May sunshine brought an average bloom in mid-June followed by a glorious summer. We enjoyed many classic 80-degree Willamette Valley days, with nighttime highs staying down in the 50s even in August, typically the warmest month here in Oregon. The only exception to these consistent diurnal swings was a single big heat spike in mid-August. We anticipated picking in early September. However, some fortuitous rain events allowed us to push back harvest and we were thankful for the additional hang time.
Harvest came early, but not too early. We brought in beautiful fruit and we were pleased to still be picking Pinot noir into early October. When you have fast accumulation of fruit sugars, cool weather can be a welcome respite with even small amounts of rain helping the grapevines regulate and slow ripening. One of the reasons why Oregon Pinot Noir is so prized is for its freshness of fruit, and you can only get that vibrancy when it’s under 50 degrees during picking.
2023 brought amazing fruit quality, but our production was down, especially on cool climate white wines like Pinot Gris. Being an estate grown winery, we must follow Mother Nature’s lead as we cannot buy fruit to increase production. Smaller yields do mean a smaller crop and less wine, but we embrace vintage variation. Another great benefit of being estate grown is that it’s our decision exactly when to pick. Rather than rushing to bring fruit into the cellar, in 2023 were able to play the odds and wait out the rain on blocks that needed additional hang time to get the flavor development we needed.
This wine is made from two barrels from our Roosevelt Vineyard and two barrels from our Mount Richmond East Vineyard.
This wine is crafted from six of our best once-filled barrels. These are often some of our favorite barrels with well-balanced oak impact, but we rarely get the opportunity to blend them together.
Fruit is fermented in small, temperature-controlled steel tanks, hand punched down twice daily, and barreled in french oak barrels. After 10 months of aging in once-filled barrels, only those most representative of the Collectors Club profile are carefully blended to create a balanced, intensely fruit-forward Oregon Pinot Noir.
Review Collectors Reserve.