2023 Maison L'Envoye Pinot Noir Two Messengers Willamette Valley 750 ml

Felipe Ramirez is one of the Willamette Valley’s superstar winemakers.

Look up the top-scoring Pinots in any vintage, and the luxury bottles he crafts for Rose & Arrow will be at the very top of the list—he’s got 96- and 97-point scores galore, plus a few reviews that go even higher. 

But savvy locals know there’s an under-the-radar way to drink Felipe’s Pinot without dropping that kind of coin: Maison L’Envoyé. 

Their 2023 Two Messengers Pinot is made with many of the same techniques as Felipe’s most treasured wines—top vineyards, native-yeast fermentation, and an “infusion” style extraction—but it’s priced for weeknight drinking. 

Any number of the vineyards that go into Maison L’Envoyé’s Two Messengers are prestigious enough to be bottled on their own, and many of them are single-vineyard wines in the hands of other wineries. For this bottling, L’Envoyér sources Pinot from Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, one of the oldest sites in the AVA. It’s so prestigious that wineries as far afield and famous as Kosta Browne work with the grapes, prizing the site’s warm days for ripeness and whipping Van Duzer winds in the evening that thicken skins and preserve freshness in the glass.

They add to that grapes from Hyland Vineyard near McMinnville, which is legendary for its role in Oregon’s “Judgment of Paris” moment in 1985. Now, it’s one of Oregon’s oldest and most acclaimed vineyards, a site that has inspired single-vineyard knockouts from Patricia Green Cellars ($86) and Penner-Ash ($65), and supplied stars like Beaux Frères, Antica Terra, and Bergström. It brings dark fruit and coiled power to this cuvée.