Twelve Estate Pinot Noir 2013
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2012-
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Spectator
Our first vintage was 2003, and to date all Twelve wines have been ‘estate’, i.e. made only from the fruit of our own vineyard. Our 12.5 acre vineyard is LIVE-certified and part of the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. It includes blocks of the Pommard, Wadenswil and 115 clones of Pinot Noir. We also have a small block of Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris which forms our Estate White bottling. Our vines range in age from 13 to 27 years old.
We are the kind of winery that’s on the more informal side of the scale. We love wine and we love talking to people about what we do. Wine and learning about wine should never be intimidating.
People do want to know where the name came from. It all started with the discovery that everything other name we liked proved to be already taken – in English, French, Spanish and Italian. After we bottled the 2003 vintage into shiners (bottles with no labels), the pressure became acute to find a name. We started drinking and finally decided on numbers as a direction, eventually winnowing the possibilities down to ‘eleven’ and ‘twelve’. Somewhere close to the end of the second bottle of wine, John remembered one of his favorite movie scenes – the ‘it goes to eleven’ scene from ‘This is Spinal Tap’ (type ‘goes to eleven’ into YouTube if you’d like to see it). We decided that our wine had to go one number higher than Nigel’s special amplifier, hence ‘twelve’.
Home of some of the planet’s most amazingly elegant and expressive Pinot noir, the Willamette Valley is a pastoral, mixed landscape of green, bucolic rolling hills, dramatic forestlands and small, independent, friendly wine growers. As a leader in environmental stewardship, the valley has some of the nation’s most protective land use policies, with two-thirds of its vineyards farmed sustainably and over half, organically. While the valley claims a cool, continental climate, and is heavily influenced by the cold, moist winds of the Pacific Ocean, its warm and dry summers allow for the steady, even ripening of Pinot noir.
The potential of Willamette Valley Pinot noir continues to attract the investment of serious growers and winemakers both locally and from abroad, as naturally the finished wines bring accolades from professionals and enthusiasts. With a range of styles from delicate dried cherry, raspberry and hibiscus to stronger notes of truffle, mocha, plum and spice, a fine Willamette Valley Pinot noir is a perfect expression of both character and grace.