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Winery:
Winderlea Vineyard

$74.95 Regular

$67.45
in any 12 bottle order or Build a Case

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Wine Advocate 93 Points

Review:

2010 Wine Advocate - 93 points - Winderlea’s 2010 Pinot Noir Legacy comes from the oldest vines on their estate: Wadenswil, Pommard, and Coury selections all historically associated with the Willamette’s viticultural pioneers. The flavor profile of Winderlea vineyard comes through loud and clear when one compares this wine with its “Winderlea Vineyard”-labeled counterpart from younger vines and Dijon clones, because both have in common a high-toned herbal and floral intensity that – like each wine’s fruit character – appears as though shadowed by their distilled counterparts. Here we have soaring aromatic and glowing inner-mouth intensity; finer tannins; and stony, piquantly fruit pit, and legume sprout notes lending the finish a certain austerity as well as palate-staining persistence. This athletically lean and energetic, already dynamically if somewhat illusively complex Pinot will almost surely reward and deserve at least a dozen year’s attention. - David Schildknecht

2009 Vintage Tasting Notes

In 2009, the famous winemaker who had contracted for most of Windelea Vineyards' oldest and arguably best vines (planted in 1974/75) decided not to take them.

Robert Brittan grabbed the beautiful fruit and made the "Legacy". In Robert's words "the old vines, in the right site and healthy, made a gorgeous wine with layers of elegant intensity. It's deceptive - you don't expect something as ethereal in the mouth to finish so big, intense and layered."

2009 Wine Advocate - 94 points - The 2009 Winderlea Legacy Pinot Noir, a cuvee of old vines that spent 10 months in 33% new French oak, deftly combines elegance with power along with the most complexity of the estate wines. Give it 2-3 years of cellaring and drink it through 2021 if not longer. These three wines nicely display the quality of the Winderlea terroir.

Transplanted Bostonians Bill Sweat and Donna Morris had the good sense to hire Robert Brittan (for more see Brittan Vineyards) to make their wines from one of the Willamette Valley's finest terroirs. I inexplicably missed the Winderlea 2008s so they are included along with the superb 2009s. - Jay Miller