2020 Solena Estate Pinot Noir Grande Cuvee Willamette Valley 750 ml

In back-to-back-to-back years, no Pinot Noir has compelled Wine Access members to pack it in their cellars like Soléna’s Grande Cuvée. Burgundy, Sonoma, Santa Barbara—this ruby-hued bottling has outsold EVERY other Pinot we’ve offered, and it hasn’t even been close.

Winemaker Laurent Montalieu’s custom cuvées have fetched $200+ at the Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Auction, and he tapped some of the same vineyards that go into his top bottlings for this 2020 Grande Cuvée. It’s the Pinot that led us to rethink the term “quality-to-price ratio” and start saying “quality-to-price disparity” instead. The 2020 has everything that tips us off to Willamette Valley excellence: balance, deep red fruit, fresh acidity, and a personality that kept us taking sip after sip until the bottle was history. 

Montalieu’s uncanny ability to consistently deliver Pinot greatness owes much to his access to top Willamette Valley fruit. Over his three decades in Oregon, he’s put together an impressive collection of vineyards, including the 80-acre Soléna estate, Domaine Danielle Laurent in Yamhill-Carlton, and the Hyland Vineyard in McMinnville. These sources guarantee that grapes that could compose expensive vineyard-designate Pinots instead find their way into the Grande Cuvée.

When it comes to “quality, complexity, and price, there is no finer value in the world,” Laurent once told us. He was talking about Willamette Pinot Noir in general, but we think his words describe the Grande Cuvée quite nicely.