2017 Dunn Forest Pinot Noir

2015 DUNN FOREST PINOT NOIR

Tasting Notes:
A marriage of young and old vines from our estate vineyard, Dunn Forest, this reserve won’t disappoint.  Dark fruit flavors and chewy tannins highlight a wine that is enjoyable now and into the future. This wine should cellar well over the next 7-10 years, but you could easily enjoy a bottle or two now.  At this writing, June 2020, we recommend decanting or at least opening the bottle a few hours early and letting it breath.  The extra oxygen will help soften the tannins and make the wine more approachable.  As always, an excellent food companion, we recommend lamb shanks with white beans or for a weeknight meal, ribeye on the grill.

Winemaking Notes:
The fruit was gently de-stemmed by a Euro Select into 1.5-ton fermenters leaving a remarkably high whole berry content. A two-day cold soak preceded inoculation done with a variety of yeasts designed to increase complexity and mouth-feel.  Fermentations were punched down in the morning and pumped over in the evening for 12-14 days with temperatures peaking around 84°F.  The wine was racked via gravity to settling tanks keeping each lot separate and was allowed to settle for two days before being racked to French oak barrels. The skins were shoveled into the press and pressed off to their own settling tank before racking.  Keeping the free run and press wines separate gives us more flexibility come summer when we start blending.  The wines were inoculated for malo-lactic and allowed to age for ten months.  At the end of August 2016, the four selected reserve barrels were racked to neutral barrels for an additional year of aging.  The wine was racked from barrel, blended in tank and bottled in September 2017.

Harvest Notes:
The 2015 growing season is now the warmest on record for the Willamette Valley. The prolonged heat posed some real challenges for this vintage. Initially we thought we would have a surplus of grapes which can lead to ripening issues but as the 100+ degree days persisted, our concerns were that the higher temps would yield fruit that lacked acidity. Prolonged higher temps can also produce higher alcohol content due to the increase in sugar. We chose harvest dates carefully to avoid those issues leading to our earliest pick of BeckenRidge Pinot noir.

Our winery and our estate vineyard, Dunn Forest, are LIVE Certified Sustainable and Salmon Safe. The vineyard is hand cultivated allowing us to respond to individual vine needs.

A printout of this and the technical data is available under the 'Wine Information' tab above, 'Download Wine Notes'.