2018 Raptor Ridge Pinot Noir Willamette Valley

WSI93 This is a delicious Pinot from Raptor Ridge at a remarkable price. Sweet mouthfeel of delicate strawberries and raspberries, a summer stickiness and sappy quality that gives the wine structure and substance well above this price category. Not overly complex but very pleasant with savory notes throughout!
Estate Notes: All Pinot is cluster-sorted with a small fraction of whole cluster at the bottom of select fermenters before destemming into small 1.5-ton fermentation vessels. Each Pinot noir lot saw on average 5 days of cold soak, and an average of 18 days skin contact. Fermented with WS and 3001 yeast to give a fruit forward, clean fermentation, the 2018 Barrel Select spent 10 months aging with 28.3% barrel intensity / 11.6% New French Oak. 2500 cases produced. 

Our Barrel Select Pinot noir is our most diverse and complex blend of 100 percent Pinot noir from our Estate Vineyard, and multiple vineyard sites throughout four of the now seven nested AVAs in the Willamette Valley. Our winemaking team “tunes” and “tweaks” various trial blends comprised of percentage-wise mixes from over 100 barrels hand-picked from our cellar before arriving at each year’s decision for the Barrel Select blend. Our intent with this wine is to craft a modestly-priced, excellent Pinot noir that is expressive of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

We first noticed budbreak in the vineyard starting April 13th, 2018. The vintage started off with cooler temperatures and average rainfall, but soon changed to a dry and slightly warmer than normal growing season. Mid-September brought some much-needed rain to freshen up the vines and get us through to picking. We commenced picking September 19th to October 9 th with no outstanding weather events or critters begging us to pick earlier. Our Pinot Noir vineyard sources all came in at averages of 24.0 Brix, 3.46 pH, and 5.3TA.