92pts James Suckling

A deep youthful ruby, the 2021 Pinot Noir Chehalem Mountain Vineyard is ripe and attractive, with primary notes of mixed berries, fresh violets, and wet stone. Medium-bodied, with mouth-filling fruit, it’s highly appealing now, with velvety tannins and a great lift of freshness on the finish. It is drinking great today and will be solid drinking over the coming 4-6 years.

Wine Enthusiast

Soft tannins and a slick and slippery mouthfeel provide a hedonistic sip as espresso and black cherry aromas fill the surrounding airspace. The wine's flavors of raspberry cake icing and blueberry yogurt, however, need a bit more supporting acidity. 

Winemaker's Notes

This is richly colored, highly aromatic and abounding with darker/bluer sort of fruit notes and finishing with an excellent structural composition that reins everything allowing for it to be balanced and delicious in the short term while giving appropriate framing for, most certainly, medium term aging and quite possibly rewarding aging well into a second decade in bottle. 

Vineyard Notes

Chehalem Mountain Vineyard is a lower lying hillside that juts up quickly from Dopp Rd. which traverses the small valley that divides the AVAs. The vineyard slopes mostly lightly from the Northeast corner down to the Southwest corner with undulations and some steeper and flatter parts running through it making it a fairly diverse spot. The soil is of the Willakenzie series which is all marine sedimentary. The topsoil is dry and dusty with no rocks. The subsoil is a mixture of shale, sandstone, and clay with the former two found at the higher portions and the latter in the lower parts. The vineyard’s defining characteristic likely comes from the large hill directly to the west dividing from the Ribbon Ridge AVA which makes it warmer than most vineyards in that AVA and less windy than many of the “inner” Chehalem Mountain AVA sites to its east.