August Cellars 2003 Pinot Noir

The Winery: August Cellars
The Wine: 2003 Pinot Noir
The Price: $20 at their tasting room and online.

This was one of the wines I purchased during my recent trip through the Willamette Valley. August Cellars is a new winery to me. I've never noticed their wines in any of my local stores, and it was purely accidental that I stopped there on my trip. I only bought a couple of bottles of wine (look for a review of the 2004 Pinot Noir in the near future).

This wine has a lot of sediment in the bottle. Oddly, I had grape skins when I poured the first glass from the bottle. It doesn't seem to have adversely impacted the quality of the wine, but there's definitely more sediment than I'm used to seeing. The wine is a very, very deep red in color. It has a delicious cherry flavor, with hints of pepper. It is a very bright and well balanced Pinot Noir. I like this wine a lot. I will definitely be hitting my local wine shops to see if they carry it. In retrospect, I wish I would have purchased a few more bottles from August Cellars on the Willamette Valley trip, but they were the first stop of the day and I didn't want to blow the budget at my first stop. I will definitely be stopping in at their tasting room again on my next trip through the Willamette Valley.