2022 Lemelson Pinot Noir Thea's Selection Willamette Valley 750 ml

Lemelson’s Thea’s Selection has graced multiple Wine Spectator Top 100 lists. It’s been poured at scores of top restaurants, and—most importantly—has received an avalanche of five-star member reviews over the years. 

It’s sourced from five of Lemelson’s estate vineyards, but the key to Thea’s is that most of it comes from their holdings in the Yamhill-Carlton District. Home to luminaries like Soter, Shea, and Ken Wright, Yamhill-Carlton produces the Willamette Valley’s most black-fruited, dense, and ripe Pinot Noirs. 

Lemelson’s perfectly manicured vines have been farmed organically since inception, a practice in keeping with founder Eric Lemelson’s overarching philosophy of sustainability. In fact, when we started offering these wines, Oregon was small enough that the winery owned over 10% of the organic vineyards in the state.

Eric, who moved to Oregon in the late ‘70s, was an environmental lawyer before falling in love with Pinot Noir and planting his first vineyard in 1995. He built and continues to improve his gravity-flow winery, which processed its first harvest in 1999, using the most environmentally sound methods and materials available. 

While costly, the result of Lemelson’s powerful and comprehensive winemaking vision shines in the glass through striking, terroir-driven purity and transparency—the kind found in bottles twice the price. This is what Oregon tastes like at its truest and most focused. 

The 2022 vintage was a rollercoaster in the Willamette Valley—but one that ended up producing “impressive…open, supple and refreshing” Pinot Noirs, in the words of the Wine Advocate. It started off with frost that hammered yields, but then a hot summer and warm fall ended up saving the day. The Advocate declared the results, “high-quality wines that drinkers should seek out.”