#wine #pinotnoir # winevideo #wineexpert Oregon Pinot Noir - David Kohl The Grape Explorer

So what's the grape discord talking about today? Our place, it's called Oregon and it's Willamette Valley. We're in JK Carrier Winery, Pinot Noir territory. This is where the Pinot flourishes and if you look at the soil composition a little bit, you can see it's clay mixed with rock. This time of the year, which we're Memorial Day, you can start to see the buds are coming. They're very delicate there. Long growing season in Oregon, usually they start picking grapes in October, so we have a long way to go here. But as you can see, the vineyard is going all the way down to the tree line here and you can see in the distance the mountain range. So beautiful area. This Pinot comes across as very classical Pinot. It's got a lot of Burgundian flavors, so it's got a little bit of minerality, which I like. I like wines that have expression, because if you just taste Pinot Noir and it doesn't have that mineral or that composition of the soil, it doesn't have any verve we call. So this is a really cool Pinot Noir place to grow. It's cool climate today. It's kind of overcast. It's really kind of misty, foggy, perfect for what we call perfect Pinot Noir region. So we had a chance to taste a young vine here, which was 2016, and it was a separate block vineyard. So it's interesting to taste. This is 2012. So the nuances that I'm getting are definitely Burgundian, because now the scents that I'm getting out of these wines are, you get a lot of florist and almost damp leaves, like almost like wood decay. That tells me that these wines are age-worthy, and when I'm talking Pinot Noir, you cannot just drink a young Pinot Noir and expect the wine to be wonderful right away. You'd like to see at least four or five, six years, eight years in the bottle to see what kind of characteristics the wine will take on, and now this is why we think that Oregon, or Oregon Pinot Noir, especially Willamette Valley, has a Burgundian thought process, because now I'm smelling, you know, things that I would smell in an older Burgundy. So yes, the wines do have an interesting flavor profile when they're young, but when you do put the wines down, now that tells me that if you want to age these wines a little bit, they're going to, they're going to gain in complexity, they're going to gain in extraordinary kind of flavors of the soil composition that we have here. So that leads me to believe that Oregon is definitely on the cusp of making world-class wines, which we knew 25 years ago, 20 years ago they could make great wines. Now you're starting to see this Burgundian thought come to fruition, because we always thought that Oregon could make Burgundian style of wine. Now we're showing that they can do it. Last little chat here at Jake Carrier, Jim just opened 2006, so now we're tasting silky. When we get to a really older Pinot Noir, we get the fruit the first time around, the second time around we're getting all the interesting flavors like the leaves and the forest, and then we get just pure silk, like velvety silk. So again, what I want to get to people that understand about Pinot Noir is that, you know, in different areas of the world, Pinot Noir doesn't grow because of all the different factors that go into the climate. I mean we're cold, I actually had to put on a coat here because we're really chilly here. So this is what you need to make what we call really classic Pinot Noir, and especially when we start getting older Pinot Noir, it just changes the dynamics of the wine. And now we're tasting, you know, what I showed you before, the fruit the first time around, the second time around, the secondary flavors of the leaves and the forest. Now you're getting all those components all wrapped into one wine, and it's beautiful right now, silky. So, cheers!