2015 Keeler Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills Oregon 750 ml

Food & Wine: “One of Oregon’s Best-Kept Secrets”

If you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, or aren’t planning a visit to Oregon and the Amity Hills, don’t count on finding this richly perfumed, Pinot Noir on retail shelves near you. Luscious, vibrant, and raspberry-scented with polished tannins—Keeler Estate is a real hidden gem and great value.

But don’t just take our word: The Eola-Amity subzone of Oregon’s Willamette Valley is home to superstar wines from the likes of Cristom, Drouhin, Serene, and Siduri. Keeler Estate is an under-the-radar local favorite named “one of Oregon’s best-kept secrets” by Food & Wine.

Chilly breezes sweep down the Van Duzer Corridor into the Keeler’s 30-acre estate, moderating warmth and extending ripening in the vineyards. The Keelers went to great lengths to perfectly match vines—including Pommard, Dijon, and Wadenswil Pinot Noir clones—with soil types, ending up with 15 different vineyard blocks. But the real key to Keeler’s success, and the reason the site so often garners comparisons to Burgundy, is their commitment to biodynamic principles and a polycultural approach. Oyster and shitake mushrooms poke out of the ground while bees buzz through the air and owls watch from the tree branches—a complete ecosystem that ensures pristine, healthy berries packed with flavor.

When the Keelers bought the 200-acre farm at the base of the Amity Hill, they were about the only ones that could see its potential. Overgrown, unkempt, and covered in bramble and blueberries, it hardly looked like a site that Food & Wine would one day laud as among the two-dozen must-visit wineries in Washington and Oregon. With a lot of work, the Keelers turned it into precisely that. Beneath the weeds they pulled, and the trees and branches they cleared, lay superb terroir and enviable south-facing slopes.

Craig and Gabriele Keeler’s biodynamic 30-acre estate is farmed as meticulously as a plot in Chambolle-Musigny, while the fruit shows all the New World ripeness and bracing coastal freshness that we adore from the subregion. Wine & Spirits magazine adored the “spiced cherry, blackberry and balsamic” flavors in this 2015 release, noting the wine bursts with “compelling tension.”

Rarely has the estate proved as valuable as in the 2015 vintage, moist and cool, which Wine Spectator deemed “extraordinary.” In a vintage report entitled: “Oregon: Pinot Still King”, James Suckling, called the 2015s “exceptional” and “fabulous,” noting that he and his team rated 90 percent of the Pinots they tasted over 90 points.

Critics across the board were singing a similar tune: Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate wrote that the vintage included “some of the finest Pinots Oregon has ever produced.”