2023 Benmar Pinot Noir Into the Fog Willamette Valley 750 ml

When we tasted Benmar’s 2023 Into the Fog Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, we were grinning ear to ear. We could easily understand how it earned a 96-point score from Decanter magazine. Harder to believe was that this was just the second vintage for the Oregon winery.

Once he got the wine bug, Greg Bybee dropped everything to get a job at Rochioli—first just in the tasting room, just to get an “in,” then in the cellar with any winemaking work they’d let him do. Eventually he’d had the chance to be involved in nearly every part of the process. It amounted to an advanced degree in high-end Pinot production.

In the decade since, Greg has taken that knowledge and worked toward the ultimate goal of opening his own winery. But rather than take up in Sonoma, he looked north to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, which was still full of untapped potential. His first vintage, 2022, debuted to 95-point praise. The 2023 Into the Fog is even better.

Greg took Rochioli’s insistence on prime vineyards to heart, sourcing Pinot Noir from two PRIME sites for this bottling. The vast majority comes from the heart of the Dundee Hills, Oregon’s most prestigious growing area. It’s a site he can’t name not far from NYSA Vineyard, a longtime star in the Ken Wright portfolio. He blends that with a portion of fruit from the Cattrall Vineyard, one of the oldest plantings in the windswept Eola-Amity Hills.

The result is a bottle that harnesses an outstanding vintage into a glass of wild red cherries, cranberries, blood oranges, damp earth, and spiced tea. It’s got complexity to spare and the structure to blossom for a decade.