Roco Gravel Road Willamette Valley Pinot Noir NV

Roco Gravel Road Willamette Valley Pinot Noir NV

Roco Gravel Road Willamette Valley Pinot Noir has an old world style that offers bold flavour with balance and grace to pair well with nearly any food. A conjunction of the 2019 and 2020 vintage, this nonvintage Pinot Noir is truly “greater than the sum of its parts”. The elegant poise of the 2019 vintage is layered with a minority of the robust concentration of 2020’s personality. The deft combination of these two very different vintages has revealed a masterful expression of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir.

100% Pinot Noir. The hills in the Willamette Valley are punctuated by gravel roads, which lead to the regions finest vineyards. The fruit for this wine is a blend of several distinctive vineyards including the Soles' own Wits' End Vineyard in the Chehalem Mountains AVA. 

Handpicking of the fruit and then overnight chilling to 38°F in Roco's large cold room. The chilled bunches are gently de-­stalked and the whole berries fall into small 1.6 ton open fermenters. The berries soak for 10 days before fermenting with Roco's proprietary, house-­cultured, indigenous wine yeast. Soaking allows gentle extraction of colour and flavour from the berry skin rather than the bitter-tasting seeds. Fermentation at 28°C with hand punching twice a day to mix skins and fermenting juices. A post-fermentation soak occurs until the wine is just right for removing from the skins and seeds. At that time the ferment is gently pressed in a modern tank press. The young wine is then sent to barrel for malolactic fermentation to soften the acidity and to add further complexity, then racked once to new, one-, two- and three-year-old, tight-grained, French oak barrels. The wine ages in barrel for 18 or more months before bottling.

AWARDS & ACCOLADES

WILFRED WONG OF - 90 POINTS

"The ROCO Gravel Road Pinot Noir offers a smooth, magic carpet ride on the palate. TASTING NOTES: This wine offers aromas and flavors of blackberries, other black fruits, and leather. Serve it with oven-baked lamb shanks. (Tasted: January 1, 2022, San Francisco, CA)"

- 90 POINTS

"A snappy red, with lively cherry and pomegranate flavors, hints of stony mineral and fine-grained tannins on the finish."

- 88 POINTS

"This is two-thirds 2019 and one-third 2020 fruit, a tactic adopted by a number of wineries after the difficult 2020 vintage. The result is a widely available, well-priced wine with modest size and scope. It's surprisingly soft on the palate, with flavors of rhubarb and wild strawberries along with light impressions of stems."