Crowley La Colina Vineyard Pinot Noir 2021
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Crowley Wines was founded in 2005 with a focus on transparent, terroir-driven winemaking. Starting at the source, they favor older clones of Chardonnay and the classic Wadenswil and Pommard Pinot noir clones due to their late ripening nature and acid retention.
Crowley works with family owned vineyards and prefer cooler, high elevation sites. Their friends and growers are committed to non-irrigated and low impact farming. They are members of the Deep Roots Coalition and their primary vineyard sources are LIVE certified or certified organic. In the winery their highest priority is to create the most direct evidence of both vintage and place while making elegant and exciting wines. This means (wine geek alert!) minimal acid additions, no extraction enzyme, employing native yeasts, extended aging in mostly neutral oak and minimal fining or filtration. Crowley values purity of expression over stylized wines and hold essential the belief that they cannot improve on nature.
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.”
Home of the first Pinot noir vineyard of the Willamette Valley, planted by David Lett of Eyrie Vineyard in 1966, today the Dundee Hills AVA remains the most densely planted AVA in the valley (and state). To its north sits the Chehalem Valley and to its south, runs the Willamette River. Within the region’s 12,500 acres, about 1,700 are planted to vine on predominantly basalt-based, volcanic, Jory soil.