2023 Norris Estate Pinot Noir Landscape Norris McKinley Vineyard Ribbon Ridge Willamette Valley 750 ml

As surprising as it is for most wine buyers to find this much vinicultural star power stacked in Oregon’s tiniest AVA, it’s even more surprising to Robert McKinley.

He spent much of his youth on the western edge of the Chehalem Mountains, watching his parents gradually transform a hazelnut farm into a vineyard. As his nascent interest in wine took shape, he could hardly have imagined that one day a winery situated half a mile away from the family property, Beaux Frères, would be the #9 bottle on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 list…even if it did count critic Robert Parker as a co-owner!

It took a bit of wandering around the world—working at top houses in Sonoma to Torbeck in Australia’s Barossa Valley—for McKinley to realize just how special the terroir was back in Ribbon Ridge. The soils in the Norris McKinley vineyard, as throughout the sub-AVA, are remarkably uniform: mostly poor, fast-draining, high-quartz marine sandstone.

In addition to stressing vines to form darker, seductive Pinots, many winemakers associate this terroir with rose and violet aromatics and febrile intensity, yielding Burgundy-like earth and forest-floor notes with age. There is such a consistent style associated with Ribbon Ridge that McKinley says that he can reliably pick its striking Pinots out of blind line-ups.

The small size of his vineyard allows him to focus on nuances, dialing in just the right decisions for each micro-plot—picking the same block in different ways, experimenting with clonal material, using various fermentation choices for cuvées.

In 2023, the vineyard’s mix of heritage clones—Pommard, Wädenswil, Coury—and Dijon 667 and 115 provided the foundation for a rich, classical win hitting on all cylinders. Don’t miss what promises to be one of the year’s best Pinot buys.