2018 Elk Cove Vineyards La Bohème Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton 750 ml

When Joe and Pat Campbell pulled up onto a gravel road in Oregon’s Coast Range in 1974, it’s unlikely they imagined they’d one day be making one of the greatest and most coveted Pinot Noirs in the state.

More than four decades later, the winery they pioneered, Elk Cove Vineyards, produces a tight roster of single-site wines that rank with the best of Cristom, Soter, and Domaine Drouhin. Today, we’re ecstatic to have landed what is possibly their hardest-to-find bottling. 

When it comes to Pinot Noir, nothing else quite captures the grape’s visceral, dark-side-of-the-moon concentration like Elk Cove’s single-vineyard expression off La Bohème.

A visit to this steep plot in the rolling foothills of the Yamhill-Carlton AVA makes it clear why Joe and Pat named it after their favorite Puccini production: It’s a place of operatic beauty and scale. It overlooks the rocky mountain range, and at 800 feet of elevation, is one of the highest vineyards in the entire Willamette Valley.

Set amidst mountain peaks, these 20 acres are capable of producing sweeping emotions and even bigger flavors, chiseled down to a very small production of just a few hundred cases. Yields from these marine sediment soils are often under two tons per acre, and current winemaker Adam Campbell (the founders’ son) prunes and thins rigorously for low yields and maximum ripening.

Picking up and breathing in the 2018 La Bohème brings to life that sensation of sticking your nose outside a tent into the deep, dark woods, the smell of moss and forest floor blending with traces of loamy soil and dense bramble hedges. It’s 100% estate fruit, and when it sells out, it’s gone for good.

When the Campbells started out in the early 1970s, just around 200 acres in the entire state of Oregon were dedicated to vines. The family lived in a trailer while rehabilitating what was then an old homestead property.

They’d chosen the site for its shallow, well-draining soils, steep hillside terrain, and panoramic views of the Willamette Valley. In the winter of that first year, a herd of 40 Roosevelt elk bedded down in the clearing by the Campbells’ trailer. They’d come for the same reason that vines would ultimately thrive there: shelter. Mountain ranges stand on nearly every side, with Pacific breezes blowing in from the west to cool the steep, porous slopes.

Those rugged conditions and the type of Pinot vines planted here make for tiny, intense clusters. Gently handled via a gravity flow system, aged in French oak, only the best barrels are chosen to go into this bottle—a timeless torchbearer of Oregon excellence.