SuNu Matteri Vineyard Pinot Noir 2017
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Jeb
Dunnuck -
James
Suckling -
Robert
Parker
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Matteri Vineyard surveys commanding vistas of the surrounding countryside from its gently rolling, South-facing slopes. Dry and windswept at 550 feet, clones 115 and 777 do battle with the elements to produce tiny berries with powerful richness and intense flavor.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
I loved the 2017 Pinot Noir Matteri Vineyard and this beauty comes all from clone 777 and was mostly destemmed (80%) and is still aging in 40% new French oak. It’s fresh, focused, and medium-bodied, with exotic notes of orange blossom, dried flowers, raspberries, peach pit, and spice. It’s certainly the most complex and layered in the lineup and blossoms with time in the glass.
Rating: 93-95
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James Suckling
A very foresty nose with wild herbs, flowers, leaves and bracken, wrapped into dried red-cherry aromas. The palate has a very composed shape and pleasantly sinewy tannins are thrust forward in the mix. Supple and smoothly resolved at the finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Pinot Noir Matteri Vineyard Clone #115/777 has reticent scents of violet, dried flowers and dusty earth with a core of red and black berries. Medium-bodied, it's silky, juicy and delicate, finishing long.
Twenty-two years ago, Betz Family Winery was founded with a basic tenet: search ceaselessly for the highest quality vineyard sites, pay attention to every detail in the vineyard, then give time in the cellar for slow evolution of each parcel’s unique characteristics. The French have a saying for this emphasis on vineyard as the primary engine of wine quality and character, “Sous Nous,” which means “under us.” We believe that the soul of our wine is not in the cellar…it’s under us in the jumbled mixture of soil and vine.
This quest for unique expressions of site and variety, or “Sous Nous” has taken us through the best plantings of Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah and Grenache across Washington. It brought us to impossibly old, dry-farmed bush vines of Chenin Blanc in South Africa. And now, it has led us to a new and perhaps inevitable destination: limited-production bottlings of Pinot Noir from exceptional single vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
Oregon’s Willamette Valley is the former floor of the Pacific Ocean, holding marine sediment deposited over millennia amongst a tangled maze of creases and folds in the Earth. The vines planted here exhibit a diverse range of intense expression…delicate and profound Pinot Noir that embodies the essence of that magical marriage of site and grape which brings us back to explore the variations again and again. After years of methodical searching, we’ve found several extraordinary parcels grown on this Marine sediment layer in the northern Willamette Valley, predominantly in the in the Yamhill Carlton Appellation. Each site reflects a different facet of Pinot’s elegant and seductive breadth: Guadalupe Vineyard, Matteri Vineyard, Saffron Fields Vineyard and the iconic Shea Vineyard. These make up the inaugural release of SUNU.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Yamhill-Carlton, characterized by pastoral, rolling hills composed of shallow, quick-draining, ancient marine soil, is ideal for Pinot noir and other cool-climate-loving varieties. It is in the rain shadow of the Coast Range to its west, whose highest point climbs to an altitude of 3,500 feet. Yamhill-Carlton is actually surrounded by mountains on three sides: Chehalem Mountains to the north, the Dundee Hills to the east and the western Coast Range to its west, which, when it lets Pacific air through, serves to cool the region.
Vineyards grow on the ridges surrounding the two small communities of Yamhill and Carlton and cover about 1,200 acres of this 60,000 acre region, which roughly makes a horse-shoe shape on a map.