I loved this beautiful Pinot at first sip. A great vintage for Oregon, this wine was perfectly balanced and tasted luxurious. It’s a bit riper than usual for the Pacific Northwest, more like California—which no Oregonian would want to hear. It offers ripe aromas and flavors of wild blackberries, black cherries, and plums with tasty notes of tangy red cherries, raspberries, and blueberries. Its Willamette Valley pedigree shows in its thread of spice, earth, and smoke. It’s deliciously drinkable on its own, but a great choice for dinner, whether it’s steak, lamb chops, poultry, or salmon. Available at Tastes of the Valleys Pismo Beach, it’s a very good buy at $29.99 and won’t last long.
This article appears in Jan 5-12, 2012.