Also recommended, but no tasting note given.
Based in Gaston near the northern edge of the Willamette Valley, Elk Cove was founded by Pat and Joe Campbell, whose son Adam (though he looks too young today to have done so) took over in 1995. There are 250 acres of vines, including six sites subjected to dedicated bottlings. Nearly half of the vines, surprisingly, are white. Pinot is not always entirely de-stemmed; typically but not always ferments spontaneously; and is bottled (with the exception of the entry-level cuvee) at around 16 months. While the percentage of new wood employed is analytically modest, there was an extraneously caramelized sense to a couple of the Pinots I tasted. I did not have time to taste nearly the entire range of current wines – on whose labels, incidentally, no names of sub-A.V.A.s appear; rather only “Willamette Valley.”
Tel. (503) 985-7760