2014 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Noir “Marie Louise” Willamette Valley 750 ml

Wine Spectator Calms WineAccess Nerves — A 94-97pt Miracle in Oregon

We knew it was coming. Nearly everyone in Willamette Valley did. Still, critics are notoriously capricious. What if Wine Spectator didn’t see the 2014 vintage for what it truly is — one of the richest and surely the finest Pinot Noir vintage in Oregon history?

Last September, we traveled to Oregon with two objectives in mind. First, there’s nothing quite like tasting freshly picked Pinot Noir berries right off the sorting table. Second, we’d heard that the 2015 harvest was excellent, and as large as — if not larger than — 2014. If so, growers would not only have more fruit than barrels to store it, but they’d also be strapped for cash like never before.

Earlier this week, Wine Spectator calmed our nerves. Not only did the magazine drop a 94- to 97-point vintage rating on Oregon’s 2014 Pinot Noir, but we read and relished the feature story that will have every California Pinot Noir enthusiast in America turning his attention towards the Pacific Northwest!

We’ll make this easy for you: If you’re a Pinot Noir collector, do as Wine Spectator suggests and buy EVERY bottle of the 2014 single-vineyard Pinot Noirs from the likes of Beaux Frères, Cristom, ArborBrook, Lange, and Domaine Serene.

Suffice it to say that when Bernie semi-retired from one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital funds, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and decided to either buy or develop vineyard land, money was no object. He could have returned to Beaune and picked up a hillside slice of Puligny-Montrachet, Pommard, or Volnay. A château in the Médoc? Pourquoi pas? But when the Frenchman saw the magnificent undulating hillsides of a cattle farm outside of Yamhill in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, he was smitten. Lacroute purchased those 420 acres of marine sedimentary soils left behind by ancient, uplifted sea beds. Well-draining but also water retentive, strewn with sandstone, Lacroute called his estate “WillaKenzie Estate” after the soil named after Oregon’s two major rivers, the Willamette and McKenzie.

As was true throughout the Willamette Valley, 2014 was nearly perfect at WillaKenzie. The salient features of the 2014 growing season were a large, uniform fruit set, and an unprecedented number of days (25) where high temperatures topped 90 degrees.

Still, despite the steady heat, there wasn’t a single day where temperatures topped 100 degrees. Most remarkably, when Lacroute made the call to harvest in September, there was no sign of blistering at all. While yields were some of the highest on record — so were sugars! To top it off, in a vintage that really “has it all,” acids remained firm and bracing.

The 2014 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Noir Marie Louise is brilliant purple/ruby, infused with flamboyant aromas of sweet black cherry and black raspberry, framed by cedar and sweet spice. Rich, juicy, intensely concentrated, yet still vibrant and so light on its feet, filled with crushed red fruit and cherry jam, finishing with textbook WillaKenzie cut. Drink now for its youthful hedonism or lay down until the early 2020s. This one’s a keeper.