Description

Patricia Green Cellars Reserve Pinot Noir

Patricia Green Cellars has been quietly redefining what an entry-level Pinot Noir can be since the winery’s earliest days. When Patty Green and Jim Anderson founded the winery in 2000, the “Reserve” name was born out of necessity: a handful of exceptional barrels that didn’t fit neatly into any single-vineyard bottling, but were too good to blend away. What started as a practical solution became one of the winery’s signature wines, built year after year from declassified lots off some of the most respected vineyard sites in the Willamette Valley.

2024 was a dry, sunny growing season with none of the heat spikes or wildfire smoke that have complicated recent vintages, and the winery considers it one of the finest years in its history, on par with the celebrated 2023. That kind of vintage means an abundance of exceptional barrels, and this Reserve is the beneficiary: it’s built from nine vineyards, Durant, Estate, Hyland, Weber, Folly of Man, Lillie’s, La Belle Promenade, Shafer, and Freedom Hill, nearly all of which also produce their own single-vineyard bottling. Roughly 16 percent of this blend comes from Hyland Vineyard fruit, the same source behind the winery’s $75 Hyland Coury Clone bottling. More strikingly, 77 of the wine’s 178 total barrels come from vines planted between 1972 and 1983, meaning a meaningful share of this bottle is built on 40-to-50-year-old vines, a level of old-vine pedigree almost never found at this price point.

Winemaking spans the full range of the winery’s stylistic toolkit, from fully destemmed lots to whole cluster fermentation, all blended together into one wine. The result is a Pinot Noir with real intensity, structure and length for its category, drinking beautifully young while carrying real aging potential for a wine at this price.

Patricia Green Cellars Reserve Pinot Noir Notes to Your Senses

• APPEARANCE: deep ruby
• AROMA: highly perfumed, with bright red fruit character
• TASTE: red-fruited and richly flavored, with notable intensity, texture and structure for the price point
• FINISH: long, with the kind of length usually found in wines at double this cost
• ABV: 13.5%

Production was 4,368 cases