2023 Lange Estate Winery Pinot Noir Reserve Willamette Valley 750 ml

When we visited Jesse Lange, we asked him how his Reserve Pinot Noir managed to be so good, year after year.

“We take eight months to put the blend together.”

We’ve sat for some extensive blending trials over the years. But fine-tuning a blend over that much time reveals a nearly unheard-of attention to detail. Although, given the man behind the bottle, we shouldn’t have been too surprised.

Lange, an obsessive farmer, calls all the shots on when to pick. He also tracks the fruit to the crush pad, and he has a preternatural knowledge of what’s in his cellar. “We can barrel-taste 400 Pinot Noir barrels, and I can tell you the provenance of every one: fermentation, harvest data, soil type, clone…” He went on, naming about a dozen other categories that make up what he calls each barrel’s “dossier.”

With the Reserve, Lange has ultimate freedom. The only goal is to capture the essence of Jesse’s phenomenal vineyard sources, plus the character of each Willamette Valley vintage—and 2023 is already being called one of the finest of the last decade.

The Oregon Wine Board called it “A Vintage for the Ages.” The season started slow, with a cool spring that kept things restrained through early April. Then May arrived with a burst of heat that supercharged shoot growth and set up ideal pre-flowering conditions. A stretch of rain in mid-June gave the soils a deep water charge—the last meaningful rainfall the valley would see for months. July and August delivered exactly what great Pinot Noir farming looks like: stable, dry, unhurried. By the time harvest arrived, the fruit was dark, intense, and precocious.

Lange’s Reserve draws from Freedom Hill and the Lange estate vineyards in Dundee Hills, both of which go into the label’s $75–$80 single-vineyard Pinots—plus a handful of other outstanding sites including Hirschy, Yamhill, and Madrona Hill. Freedom Hill, planted in the early 1980s on ancient marine sedimentary soils in the Mt. Pisgah foothills, has long been one of the most coveted addresses in the Willamette Valley—winemakers have been known to wait years for an allocation. The Lange estate vines sit in the rust-red volcanic Jory soils of the Dundee Hills, among the most storied ground in American Pinot country.