Eyrie The Eyrie Pinot Noir 2019
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Robert
Parker
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Winemaker Notes
The Estate blend combines Pinot from Eyrie’s 5 certified-organic estate vineyards. Farming is certified organic, but Jason and his team take this only as a starting point. Viticulture at all of the Estate vineyards follows the precepts of regenerative no-till farming, with strict attention paid not just to the vines but to the healthy networks of soil organisms that support them. Not only does this approach avoid the need for artificial irrigation, it also nourishes the vines without the need for additional fertilizer, and captures atmospheric carbon.
Picked by hand, their Pinot noir is destemmed and put into a variety of fermenters, from small one-ton bins to a 5 ton wooden cuve, to undergo native primary fermentation. Their barrels are mostly neutral—for this vintage, only 8% were new. Having undergone native malolactic fermentation and aged for almost 2 years, the 2019 Pinot noir was blended after 22 months, racked once without filtration, and then bottled and sealed under Diam cork.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Pinot Noir Estate is expressive and transparent and offers incredible concentration for its weightless frame. Medium ruby in the glass, tones of flint, tar and burnt orange give way to a kaleidoscope of raspberries, red cherries, rose petals, pipe tobacco and forest floor. Medium-bodied, silky and seamless, it has a generous core of spicy fruit and a very long, layered finish. Streaked with flinty tones, it deserves to unwind in bottle for another 3-5 years, and it will be long-lived in the cellar.
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.