Description
Bergstrom has been dutifully making some of the finest, most age-worthy Oregon Pinots for nearly 20 years. Few producers have established such a reputation for consistency of excellence. Fewer yet have racked up the impressive accolades that Bergstrom has: nearly every wine scores 90+ in all the major publications with many selections fetching eye-opening scores of 95+ points! It comes down to a passion for sustainable agriculture, a focus on the details, and employing state of the art techniques in the cellar which extract the maximum potential from the excellent fruit they work with.
The Silice Vineyard is the estate vineyard that wraps around the Bergstrom tasting room in the Chehalem Mountains AVA. This area is a deep sand deposit from ancient ocean beds. The soil even has a yellowish hue to it and you can often find fossilized shells hiding in the strata. The name “Silice” means silica in French – a nod to the high silica content in the soil which helps reflect light in the vineyard and makes this a warm site for plush Pinot Noir.
This 2016 offering of the Silice is a remarkable wine, unlike any other that I’ve had from Bergstrom. Employing whole cluster fermentation and native yeast fermentation, it is about as close a wine as I’ve ever experienced to a “Burgundy” wine from the New World. This is a claim that gets thrown around a lot, but give this wine a try and I think you’ll see what I mean.
From the Winery:
Dark ruby red in color with violet reflections in the glass, the 2016 Silice Pinot Noir has a wild aromatic bouquet that leaps from the glass. Boysenberry and dark cherry fruit mingles with sassafras, cinnamon graham crackers, anise, dried herbs, smoked game, tobacco and leather. This wine is distinctly old world in character with great earthiness, mushroom, meat and tobacco flavors, yet retains a bright core of fresh fruit, spice and flowers with succulent acidity and plentiful fine-grained tannins. This is a wine for the cellar and I recommend giving it 3-5 years before enjoying, but it will live and drink well for two decades or more. If consumed in its first 3 years of life, I recommend splash decanting before drinking.
93 pts – Wine & Spirits
