Pinot Noir Exceptionalism and the Ascent of Chardonnay: Oregon 2026 Tasting Report

Winemakers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley are celebrating two exceptional but quite different recent vintages as they roll out their 2023 and 2024 pinot noirs and chardonnays, but both years are so good that winemakers are splitting hairs over which is better.  

For Guillaume Large, the winemaker at Resonance and a native of France, the 2024 wines achieved a “more harmonious balance between generosity and tension,” while the 2023s are “beautiful but a little more generous.” For chardonnay, he said, “it is probably the most complex vintage I have ever seen.”

Daniel Estrin, the winemaker and viticulturist at Cristom, who made some of our top-scoring chardonnay from 2024 and pinot noir from 2023, said he was “really pleased with both vintages,” with 2023 defined by a couple of heatwaves where “we were picking as fast as we could,” whereas ‘24 was “a lighter pace and we were able to pick exactly when we wanted to.”

These were just two of the dozens of winemakers across the Willamette Valley that we met with over the past year while we tasted our way through a record 1,300 Oregon wines. Our own take is that pinot noir, which has been the star of the Willamette Valley for the last three decades, has never been better, while chardonnay, as we reported in depth earlier this year, is increasingly a well-deserved part of the conversation.

Proving the point about Willamette Valley pinot noir exceptionalism is our first 100-point bottle from the Oregon, the Rose & Arrow Estate Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills Touchstone 2023. This is an abundant, powerful, and structured wine with spicy, earthy, and savory undertones with a deeply resonant minerality, and it really seems like the first of its kind from Oregon. It comes from a single parcel within the small, four-acre Stonecreek vineyard, which was planted in 1999, and while they only about 600 cases of the wine were made, it epitomizes the work being done vignerons who are focused on understanding and translating the terroir of the Willamette Valley.

Rose & Arrow winemaker Felipe Ramirez, who works closely with terroir consultant and fellow Chilean Pedro Parra to identify grand cru-quality sites in Willamette Valley, said that the vineyard has just the right amount of topsoil, with a mix of  fractured and vesicular basalt below it, which “gives the wine fine tannins, structure and volume … and consistently provides beautiful grapes regardless of the season.”

Standing in one of their 10-feet-deep soil pits, he uses a small hammer to easily break up the volcanic rock, demonstrating how the fractures create pockets of water and nutrients, allowing the roots to grow deep for the ultimate expression of terroir.

The Antica Terra Pinot Noir Eola-Amity Hills Antikythera 2022 is another powerful and impressive site-specific wine from a volcanic site on the western side of the Amity hills, with vines that experience an onslaught of Pacific winds.

“Working with a vineyard that speaks its own language is so exciting,” Antica Terra winemaker Maggie Harrison said when we tasted at her home late last year. She described Antica Terra’s vines as “bonsai-like,” producing “dollhouse-sized clusters” of grapes with super-thick skins.

“It is not typical of Willamette Valley or even pinot noir,” she said of the Anitkythera. “It has a moat around it in terms of typicity.” The wine is intensely aromatic with a powerful structure and compelling mix of red and black wildberries alongside profound minerality.

Some of the other top pinot noirs we tasted from Willamette Valley are from Arterberry Maresh and The Eyrie, which both spring from the red soils of Dundee Hills. Soter’s biodynamically farmed Mineral Springs vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton also gave us some memorable pinot noirs, as did Nicolas Jay’s estate in McMinnville; Ponzi in the Laurel District of the Chehalem Mountains and the Beaux Frères original 1988 plantings in Ribbon Ridge.

Jim Maresh of Arterberry Maresh said that 2024 “was the best pinot noir vintage since 2008” on his Dundee site, adding that it was “a vintage when you could hang into October. That is the holy grail of hang time – when you can stack layers of complexity.”

Josh Bergstrom, the owner-winemaker at Bergstrom, makes wine from vineyards throughout the Willamette Valley in addition to his estate in Dundee Hills. He called 2024 “the best vintage since 1999, if you are looking for elegance, freshness, and longevity.”

“There was no rock or a hard place,” he added of 2024. “Each vineyard was able to be picked at the right time, which is great for showcasing terroir. It was just one of Mother Nature’s gifts.”

Brooks, which is most famous for riesling – and made all our top-scoring wines from the variety – also surprised us with their superb pinot noirs, which all show freshness, texture, elegance and beautiful floral aromas. Brooks winemaker Claire Jarreau noted that the 2024 vintage “was a really great year for all varieties. We kept getting little kisses of rain, so you had to keep the canopy open, but it kept the wines really fresh.”

The 2024 vintage also brought out the best of Oregon chardonnay, according to some winemakers we spoke with.

“There has never been better farmed and as much chardonnay,” Seth Morgen Long of Morgen Long said of 2024 offerings. His offerings show  density, minerality, phenolic complexity and concentration.  “It was the best vintage of my career, he added, noting the striking acidity, low pH levels and “everything at 13 percent alcohol.”

His Morgen Long Chardonnay Eola-Amity Hills X Omni Vineyard 2023 was harvested 10 days later than in 2023. It is a powerful and mineral-driven wine with textural acidity and incredible length.

Other star chardonnay producers like 00, Antica Terra and Walter Scott showed stunning 2022 and 2023 releases. The first commercial release of Atomique3 Le Basalt, a joint chardonnay venture between Rose & Arrow’s Felipe Ramirez, Pedro Parra and Burgundy’s Jean-Marc Roulot, scored highly out of the gate. The wine is profoundly textural, mouthwatering and nervy.

Traditional method sparkling also had a strong showing. Our favorite newcomer wineries are Lytle-Barnett, Arabilis and Corollary, all of which are committed exclusively to sparkling wines.

Argyle, founded in 1987, is undergoing a renaissance under the direction of head winemaker Kate Payne-Browne and regenerative viticulturist Erica Miller. “We are looking at things through a new lens and creating a portfolio that truly is site expressive,” Payne-Browne said. “Do we need to make a blanc de blancs, blanc de noirs and rosé from every vineyard? Or is there one wine that best expresses that site? This is the focus of the future.”

Generational Payoff

The recent string of quality vintages can be attributed to good weather, but old vines and multigenerational knowledge are also coming into play out as the industry enters its fifth decade in the state.

Peter Shea is slowly taking over the management of his family’s legendary  wine brand, and he has begun to incorporate organic farming practices for their 155 acres and also lowered the percentage of new oak in the cellar. The Shea Wine Cellars Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Shea Vineyard Breakaway 2024 showcases the freshness, red fruit and floral nuances of the estate.

“It was probably me being tired of everyone saying that Shea is big and opulent,” Shea said. “I wanted to show that it can be bright and pretty and still have depth.”

A different type of generational shift is happening at one of the Willamette Valley’s most storied wineries, Ponzi Vineyards. Winemaker Max Bruening is making nuanced wine from the 50-year-old-plus vines but acknowledged that “the challenges we deal with today are completely different” than when the winery was in its early days in the 1970s.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s it was almost too cold to grow wine grapes in the Willamette Valley and now ripeness is becoming a problem,” Bruening said.

Ponzi started working with master pruner and viticulturist Marco Simonit in 2023, and since then “we have started to see how happy the vines are, particularly in the oldest blocks,” Bruening said. “The vines said, ‘thank you’ and paid back with very beautiful fruit.”

At Beaux Freres, Mike Etzel Jr. has taken the reins from his father, who co-founded the winery along with brother-in-law and wine critic Robert Parker in 1986. His first vintage as winemaker was 2015, and he has aimed to highlight the freshness and elegance of the property ever since.

“In the 90s we were picking for ripeness and vinifying for maximum power and extraction and barreling into 100 percent heavy toast,” Etzel said. “Now, it is less about power. We need to be gentler.”

As part of this mission, they have converted their estate to organic farming and are finding that "farming healthy soil and healthy vines helps them withstand phylloxera" and also “captures the more ethereal nature of the wines.”

Maresh of Arterberry Maresh, who is also a second-generation farmer, noted the importance and uniqueness of these own-rooted vines. Phylloxera has started to appear in the valley, but thanks to some magical combination of soil, forest breaks and estate-only equipment, it has not become widespread.

“An own rooted vine is a completely different animal than a grafted rootstock,” Maresh said. “They are big, strong creatures; they can set more crop, they can ripen more crop, they ripen slower and if you ask me, they are a superior vine. They naturally slow down faster.”

A French Push for Quality

It is impossible to ignore the influence the French are having in the Willamette Valley, but most locals agree their investments and general interest have been a positive for the region.

“The French influence has grown and that has pushed the quality higher – that is why we have great chardonnay in the valley right now,” Jackson Holstein, the second-generation grower and head winemaker for Granville Wine Co. told us as we tasted at his estate vineyard. “In the context of Burgundy, we understand there is so much room for improvement. When you state the purpose of ‘We want to make the best wine in the world,’ it changes the approach and the attention to detail.”

Domaine Drouhin was, of course, one of the first to bridge French winemaking traditions with Oregon soil when it was founded by Burgundy’s Drouhin family. It was in 1987 that Robert Drouhin and his daughter, Veronique, bought land in the Dundee Hills, and Veronique has helmed the project since.

“It is so much easier to grow grapes in Oregon compared to Burgundy,” Veronique Drouhin said as we tasted through the new releases at Domaine Drouhin this spring. For her, ease was just the beginning. “Now we are focused on nailing down the microclimates and finding the 'grand cru' blocks. After so many vintages, we are finding those blocks that consistently give you great wine. It is beyond the weather; it is in the soil or something else.”

A second French wave came in 2007, when Mark Tarlov took over the Seven Springs Vineyard in 2007 and founded Evening Lands, bringing in the legendary Burgundy winemaker Dominique Lafon, and by extension the renowned Isabelle Meunier, to make the wine. They are widely credited with introducing the winemaking techniques that have taken chardonnay to the next level in the Willamette Valley.

On a cool, cloudy day in early spring, standing at the top of the 19.5-acre Resonance vineyard in Dundee Hills, Large described arriving in Oregon for the first time with his wife and son and some suitcases in 2013. He had never been to Oregon and did not speak much English, but this was now his home.

His boss, the director of winemaking for Louis Jadot, Jacques Lardiere, had asked him to oversee a small, single-vineyard project called Resonance. “After 42 vintages at Jadot, [Jacques] came to Oregon and fell in love with the Willamette Valley, the energy and the quality of the fruit,” Large said.

Old, own-rooted vines and the opportunity to plant new vineyards – something not legally allowed in Burgundy – were also attractive propositions.

“We didn’t want to make a copy of Burgundy,” Large said. “We used our techniques to reveal the place. This is the exciting part. It is not the goal to make a Burgundian wine but to use our Burgundian experience to understand the place and what can come from it.”

Today, they own and farm 100 acres of pinot noir and 40 acres of chardonnay in three sub-AVAs, all certified organic and dry-farmed.  The Résonance Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Résonance Vineyard 2024 is a deep and focused wine with a wonderful range of aromatics from forest botanicals to wild berries.

The Willamette Valley is, of course, not without its challenges. In 2025, it failed to cool down at night during most of August and winemakers panicked as they watched the acidity the region is known for respire away. For the first time, many winemakers had to acidulate –add natural acids to the fermenting must.

In 2022, even though the wines turned out well, a spring frost pummeled the vineyards – nearly all the fruit that year came from secondary buds. But given the quality of the wines we tasted for this report coupled with the meticulous, intentional farming and winemaking we saw during our visits, we believe it has never been a better time to drink and invest in Willamette Valley wines. Check out all the tasting notes below to get a better glimpse of everything Oregon has to offer.

– Courtney Humiston, Staff Writer & Taster

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. 

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