2012 Chehalem Reserve Pinot Noir 375 mL

Please note these are 375mL bottles

WINEMAKER’S NOTES

It’s no surprise the 2012 vintage has been highly touted by critics and consumers alike, and it’s no surprise we chose this wine as our top-of-the-line wine from a top-of-the-line vintage.  This wine will blow your socks off.  Not only was it a fabulous vintage to begin with, a bit of hail in the Spring on Ribbon Ridge clipped this crop short and helped to concentrate this wine even more. Red-to-black velour in color, so deep you can barely see through it, with a bounty of dark fruit (think huckleberries and tiny soft blackberries), so concentrated and filled with sweet fruit you can hardly stand it. The flavors and aromas keep changing in the glass, but the complexity reaches out with vanilla, crème de cassis, rose hips, tamarind, tobacco, blackberry seed, warm oak, and bing cherry. Tremendous depth and density, serious tannin, juiciness, a big, lingering finish, but it’s still lively and vibrant, and it’s got ageability for the ages. Phew.

VINTAGE OVERVIEW 

This was a uniformly excellent vintage in the Willamette Valley, more so than the past few years where some winemakers read it well and others may not have. The weather was storybook, almost entirely positive, with the Grinch of hail in one or two localized sites proving we’re as vulnerable as Burgundy. The heat accumulations are the 5th highest in the last 16 years, putting ripeness in the league with 2004 and 1998. The perfectly warm and completely dry growing and ripening seasons kept disease away and pushed full ripeness without sacrificing acid structure. Check back later to see if it is even more than a great year.

91 Points - Wine Enthusiast
92 Points - Wine & Spirits
93 Points - Vinous