Great Wine Begins in the Vineyard

Careful attention to every detail from the vine and into the bottle is crucial. We are fortunate to have an outstanding team that works with us to produce the finest quality wines possible. Our vineyard is farmed meticulously throughout the growing year by best-in-class Results Partners. And we are pleased to have French-trained Laurent Montalieu as our consulting winemaker. Laurent is also involved in monitoring the development and maturity of the fruit throughout the growing season. Once harvested, our fruit is processed at one of the leading winery facilities in the country. Northwest Wine Company, located in McMinnville, Oregon, is home to the finest industry equipment available. ArborBrook benefits from the use of this operation to make our quality wines.

Hand-Sorting, EuroSelect De-stemmers and Roto-fermenters

Once our fruit arrives at the winery, attention immediately turns to its temperature. This ensures that sorting and de-stemming occurs at the optimum temperature to prevent any detrimental early-stage fermentation. Our winery facility has cooling rooms that allow the fruit to cool before processing, ensuring the best quality wines.

Once processing begins, our fruit is carefully hand-sorted before being placed into a state-of-the-art EuroSelect de-stemmer that gently removes the grapes from stems using rubber fingers instead of the crushing jaws that some de-stemmers employ. After de-stemming, whole berries are carefully sorted again to ensure only the best quality fruit is included in the fermentation process.

ArborBrook carefully ferments our Pinot Noir using small-lot fermenters. These allow us to carefully craft fines wines that are often inoculated using a variety of yeasts to bring out different flavor profiles that blend beautifully. Fermentation temperatures are carefully controlled and managed through the use of probes that measure the exact temperature at the core of the must.

We are proud to be one of the first vineyards in Oregon to also use French oak roto-fermenters that allow us to place de-stemmed whole berries directly into oak fermentation vessels. This provides for more concentrated extraction during the fermentation process. Instead of punching down the caps during fermentation which is traditional with open-top fermenters, roto-fermenters are rotated at least twice daily to maximize the amount of skin contact and fermentation.

Aging

Our Pinot Noir is aged in a combination of second-year and-new French oak barrels produced by some of the world’s finest cooperages. ArborBrook typically uses a mixture of medium to heavy toast barrels to impart a balanced oak influence into our Pinot Noir without over-oaking the wine. We generally age our wines 11 to 12 months, with extended aging in the case of some Reserve wines. Throughout aging, our barrels are held in temperature-and humidity-controlled barrel rooms to ensure that we deliver on our commitment to produce the finest quality wines possible. Our wines are bottled and stored in the Northwest Wine Company facility at perfect storage temperature until they are shipped to the consumer.

Our unique Alsatian style Pinot Gris grapes are also carefully handled using the same meticulous standards used with our Pinot Noir. However, this beautiful white wine is pressed and fermentation is done in new-and second-year French oak barrels with a portion also done in stainless steel. This allows us to later blend the barrels and again not over-oak our wines. Our process of barrel- fermentation and aging, combined with a small percentage of stainless, results in a unique, complex Pinot Gris that tends toward pear and apricot bouquet and flavors, with an intriguing vanilla finish. Both the 2004 and 2005 vintages have sold out.

Our Commitment to You

As you can see by our attention to every detail, ArborBrook is extremely committed to producing only the finest wines possible. Our outstanding viticulture and winemaking team working collaboratively from our vineyards and into the state-of-the-art facility we use are key ingredients that help us produce our outstanding wines!

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