After being walloped by what he called a ‘cosmic brick’ – a lifelong love of Pinot Noir from Burgundy – David Lett embarked on a quest to see where else, if anywhere else, this fickle grape could reach the same pinnacle of quality.

His search led him to Oregon’s Willamette Valley and, in 1965, he established the region’s first plantings of Pinot Noir.

The connection between Burgundy and Pinot’s new promised land, once merely cosmic, was now concrete.

We last reported on the France-Willamette Valley connection in 2019 and, as you might expect, much has changed.

Here’s the latest, along with reviews of 10 noteworthy Oregon wines from French-owned wineries.

New French investments and appointments: Beaux Frères and Ponzi

The famous Beaux Frères winery, founded by Michael G Etzel in the 1980s, was acquired in 2017 by French firm Maisons & Domaines Henriot.

In 2022, Henriot merged with Artémis Domaines, the fine-wine hegemon behind Bordeaux first growth Château Latour and Burgundy grand cru Clos de Tart.

Big changes ensued. Mikey (Michael D) Etzel, who had taken over winemaking duties from his father in 2017, remains Beaux Frères’ CEO and technical director, but has passed the winemaker title to Evening Land alumnus Damien Lapuyade.

Don’t let the French surname fool you: Lapuyade is a strapping American, born and raised in Napa Valley.

Lapuyade revels in the resources that Artémis provides. ‘It opens the door to all these prestigious domaines that have centuries of experience farming and growing grapes and making world-class wine,’ he says.

‘The transfer of knowledge, the cross-pollination – it’s an amazing opportunity.’

Pioneering winery Ponzi Vineyards, which was acquired by Champagne Bollinger in 2021, also looks different at the top.

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Rivail, a sharp-dressed Frenchman raised in the Rhône Valley, is now CEO of the estate, which had been headed by a Ponzi family member since its founding in 1970.

Rivail, whose own family has a nearly two-century history in the wine business, arrived with Bollinger’s checkbook and license to use it.

‘The trust they put in us is just unbelievable,’ he says. Translation: What Ponzi needs, Ponzi gets.

This is a welcome change for Max Bruening, the Ponzi veteran who inherited the winemaker role from Luisa Ponzi in 2024.

‘I didn't know what CapEx was!’ he says, noting how, before Bollinger, the winery had to make tough maintenance and investment tradeoffs.

Growing resources

Now, Ponzi has a $500,000 Bucher sorting line, new stainless steel and concrete tanks, more land, and a consulting contract with Italy-based vine consultants Simonit & Sirch, who work with elites like Burgundy’s Domaine Leroy.

‘The knowledge here in Oregon has been built on great people and cross-collaboration,’ Rivail says. ‘But international investors come with things you know are working in other regions.’

Some locals welcome the outside capital. ‘It validates everything we've been working for,’ says Josh Bergström, a homegrown Oregon vintner who studied in France and is married to a Burgundian.

‘It lends gravitas to the region, to the pioneers who knew Pinot could be great here. With other beverages taking [wine’s] market share, we need families who have been around for generations on our side.’

Not everyone is enthused. 'Neutral at best' is how independent winemaker Saul Mutchnick of Championship Bottle describes the overall effect of outside money on the Willamette Valley.

Though he acknowledges the important role such investments have played in establishing the region, Mutchnick laments how small labels often lose access to prime vineyard sites when moneyed interests move in.

He cites the Koosah Vineyard (purchased by Résonance Wines, which is owned by French stalwart Louis Jadot) and Bunker Hill VIneyard (Lingua Franca/Constellation Brands) as examples.

A two-way street: Burgundy also benefits

Burgundy has long been the world’s Pinot Noir lodestar and, at one time, inexperienced Willamette Valley vintners were eager to glean any knowledge they could from their winemaking idols. But these days, the knowledge flows both ways.

‘When we travel to Burgundy now, there’s a sense of collegiality that I don’t think used to exist,’ says Lapuyade. ‘There seems to be this mutual respect, where they’re asking as many questions to Oregon winemakers on what’s working and what’s not working.’

Véronique Boss-Drouhin, head winemaker for both Domaine Drouhin Oregon and Maison Joseph Drouhin, says the family’s Burgundy team is inspired by their Willamette Valley counterparts, noting events like the annual Oregon Pinot Camp. ‘Burgundy should have done that years ago!’

For Louis Jadot, Résonance serves as a model for effective customer relations; in 2027, the winery will host a cruise through Burgundy for its clients.

Naturally, the trip will include a visit to Jadot, and Résonance winemaker Guillaume Large will be on board.

‘How you make somebody fall in love with the wines and the brand and the story isn't through leading with the sales pitch,’ says Taylor Theis, the winery’s director of consumer sales and marketing,

Oregon Chardonnay rising: New project Atomique3

Chardonnay is on a tear in the Willamette Valley, and many vintners trace its success to Dominique Lafon, who came from Burgundy in 2007 as consulting winemaker for Evening Land.

‘He started bringing some cultural practices on how to translate this terroir,’ says Mikey Etzel, showing the locals when to pick (earlier) and how much fruit to extract (less).

Atomique3, a superb Chardonnay-only Willamette Valley label launched in the 2021 vintage, bears the influence of another Burgundy legend: Meursault’s Jean-Marc Roulot.

Atomique3’s principals – Felipe Ramirez, a Chilean who earned his Master’s degree in Montpellier in the south of France, and renowned soil expert Pedro Parra – recruited Roulot to consult.

Atomique3’s four core Chardonnays are based on soil type, which will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Parra, who has built a career on soil and even authored a book about it.

Ramirez, who drives around the Willamette Valley with chunks of basalt on the dashboard of his truck, is no less obsessed.

‘The only thing that never changes is the soil,’ he says. ‘The weather changes every year, people change, decisions change. The plans change. But the soil – you need thousands of years to see those changes.’

The Hills are still hot: Résonance, Drouhin and Nicolas-Jay

In 2022, Résonance expanded to the Eola-Amity Hills, purchasing the outstanding Koosah Vineyard, a former Christmas tree farm planted with vines in 2016.

This acquisition doubled Résonance’s Chardonnay holdings, and it now bottles a single-vineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the site.

The same year, Domaine Drouhin purchased Methven Family Vineyards, adding to the Eola-Amity Hills presence it established in 2013, when the family purchased Roserock Vineyard (which it has now spun into the Roserock label).

The 80-acre Methven property has 30 acres of vines, but the move was largely logistical: Methven is a 15-minute drive from Roserock, which lacks a dedicated production facility.

With an existing winery, water, power and ample space, Methven ticked all the boxes. ‘We were blessed to find this place,’ says Boss-Drouhin.

The facility is now known as Roserock North, and the winemaker there is French-born Drouhin veteran Isabelle DuTartre, Boss-Drouhin’s lifelong friend and her partner in Caballus Wines, which also makes Willamette Pinot Noir.

In the Dundee Hills, Nicolas-Jay, the partnership between Jean-Nicolas Méo and Jay Boberg, acquired a 52-acre site on the AVA’s north side in 2019.

They planted 25 acres of vines and renovated the property’s barn into a production winery and tasting room. In 2026, Noah Roberts was named production winemaker.

An Oregon wine legend bids adieu

Laurent Montalieu, who came to Oregon from Bordeaux in 1988, established himself as a juggernaut over the next three-plus decades.

In 2003, he founded NW Wine Company, the Willamette Valley’s first custom-crush facility – although he prefers the term ‘custom winegrowing,’ which he believes better captures the company’s range.

Over the years, NW Wine Company grew to encompass brands like Hyland Estates and Domaine Loubejac. In 2021, Montalieu sold it in what was the largest transaction in Oregon wine history.

He retired from NW Wine Company in 2024 but is still on the board, and French-born Anne Sery is now director of winemaking.

Montalieu also remains owner and winemaker at Soléna Estate, which he founded in 2000 and named after his daughter, Soléna Andrus Montalieu.

One day the winery will be hers, but it’s hard to imagine her father sitting idle in Oregon. Says Montalieu, ‘I will never retire from Soléna’.

10 fantastique Oregon wines with a French Connection

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Set up at the Kimpton Vintage Hotel in downtown Portland, I spent two days tasting the final bottled samples from nearly every lot on offer at the upcoming Willamette Valley Wine Auction (13-14 May, 2026).

I was there in my capacity as Decanter's Acting North America Regional Editor and Napa Valley Correspondent, assigning ratings and tasting notes to the auction lots.

And I realise this might be controversial. Auction lots are special blends, often culled from a single barrel or from an assemblage of the best barrels from a single vineyard site or top fruit sources.

They are bottled in 5-10 case lots, for the auction, intended to raise money for a great cause, one that usually supports the local community.

The lot is presented, paddles fly, a winning bid is announced, and these special wines disappear onto a high-end restaurant list, a fine wine retailer's shelves, or into a private cellar.

So, why rate them? Eventually, they resurface, but with nothing much about them beyond perhaps the price it sold for at auction.

I myself have been the recipient of many auction wines, and try as I may to find information on them, I usually can’t.

So, for posterity, a reference point, and to spark some conversation around rating auction wines, below are my scores and tasting notes for the 2024 vintage bottlings offered at the 2026 Willamette Valley Wine Auction.

Initial impressions of the 2024 vintage for Willamette Valley

The 2024 growing season in the Willamette Valley was, by most accounts, close to ideal.

Slow, steady ripening with bright sunny days and highs largely in the low-to-mid 20°C (70s°F), and night time temperatures dipping to the mid-10s°C (50s°F), allowed for long hang times and retention of bright, natural acidity with complex flavour development.

A brief mid-summer heat spike nudged sugars along, ripening tannin without taxing acidity.

The result is a classic Willamette profile of crunchy, ripe, vibrant fruit, modest alcohols largely in the 12.9%-13.9% range, with high natural acidity.

The Pinot Noirs are bold with firm tannic structures, the Chardonnays are striking, tension-driven, and layered, and the sparklers are bright and focused.

As one winemaker put it, this is, ‘a vintage that collectors and wine lovers will want to secure for their cellars’.

A decade of community spirit in Willamette Valley

The auction is entering its tenth year, and Executive Director Morgen McLaughlin describes it as ‘one of the Willamette Valley's most important long-term platforms, not just an annual event’.

It has allowed producers to showcase rare, small-production, library, and collaborative wines that, as McLaughlin continues, 'may not fit into a standard tasting or sales channel, giving them a way to express what makes their vineyards, winemaking, and AVA stories distinctive’.

'Just as importantly, the Auction has reinforced the collaborative spirit of the Valley.'

Over the past decade, more than $5 million has been raised to support the Willamette Valley Wineries Association's marketing, education, and brand-building programmes.

In 2025 alone, more than 80 trade bidders from 35 states and three countries participated.

This year's two-day format reflects the auction’s maturity: Day One (‘Whimsy’) welcomes collectors and consumers for an insider's look at the 2024 vintage; Day Two (‘Wonder’) is a trade-only deep dive with producers on hand.

What struck me across two days of tasting wasn't just the quality of the wines but the positive attitude of the producers behind them.

James Frey, winemaker, proprietor of Trisaetum, and prolific artist (see The James Frey Collection), described the annual auction as evidence of Willamete Valley’s, ‘strong collegial spirit’ and the ‘great group of people who still believe a rising tide lifts all boats’.

Acid-etched purity

Frey produced a sparkling wine for the auction, as did Rollin Soles of ROCO, who has been making bubbles in the valley for four decades.

I found the Willamette sparklings vivid and laser-focused, with ultra-frothy, airy mousses.

‘After 40 years, I still believe the Willamette is the finest spot in the New World for sparkling,’ Soles told me.

‘Growing above the 45th parallel means later harvests, naturally high acidity, and grapes that retain higher protein levels, which directly aids bubble retention.’

Frey added that the ultra-cool sites where Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier struggle to ripen for still wines create ideal conditions for sparkling wine.

As for the still wines: the Pinots are gorgeously pure-fruited, often nuanced by that dusty, red volcanic mineral character drawn from the region's soils, while in the whites it creates a complexity I personally couldn't get enough of.

I'm still thinking about Bethel Heights' Swan Song Chardonnay, among my highest-scoring lots, crafted from own-rooted old Wente clone vines that also produced High Wire – former North America Editor Clive Pursehouse's only 100-point wine during his entire Decanter tenure.

When I asked winemaker Ben Casteel what made those vines and site so special, his response was deeply personal: ‘That it took my father's entire career and the first 10 years of mine to produce something special is a tremendous testament to perseverance.’

At least one more vintage – a 2025 High Wire Chardonnay – is coming before, tragically, the vines succumb to phylloxera.

A note on the scores

Full auction lot scores and tasting notes are available below. They have been marked with a score range which is mentioned in the note.

The Willamette Valley Wine Auction takes place May 13-14, 2026.

To the producers and buyers: no matter my scores, each wine here is genuinely exceptional, and I hope that comes through in the tasting notes.

Top wines from this year's Willamette Valley Wine Auction

All 50+ of Jonathan's notes on the Willamette Valley Wine Auction wines can be found here.

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Can a black grape make a white wine? Although the question might seem odd, winemakers have been working with this idea for hundreds of years.

While black/red grapes have dark skins, which is responsible for the colour when making red wine, most (though not all) have white flesh – and therefore white juice. This allows the production of white wines made from black grapes by quickly and gently pressing the grape and avoiding colour extraction.

The practice of using red grapes in still white wine production has been known for centuries, and wines made this way are often referred to as ‘blanc de noir’ (literally ‘white from black’).

Though an established style, it’s not a common one. The white Merlots made in Switzerland’s Lugano region and the use of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier to make white Champagne, are among the most notable and famous examples.

But there’s a growing movement based around this concept in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

From the ashes

In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the relatively cool climate provides ideal conditions for Pinot Noir. Here, the grape is the leading variety, accounting for 60% of the overall planted acreage, according to the Oregon Wine Board.

However, the massive wildfires in 2020 and the fear that skins would retain smoke taint gave this new white wine production a boost, as it gave winemakers an outlet to salvage some of the black grapes from the difficult harvest by just using the white juice.​

The result has been a growing number of ‘white Pinot Noirs’ that, rather than fading away as a one-off expediency, have become fixtures on winery line-ups.

Styles are varied, though many winemakers opt to age theirs in barrel for six to seven months before bottling – which means they’re ready in time for tastings in the spring.

In general, the profile is a clean, bright palate with notes of green apple, mandarin, and honeydew, with balanced minerality and acidity.

A new style for Oregon Pinot Noir

Tony Rynders, the co-founder of Tendril Cellars, was among the first winemakers to make white Pinot Noir in Oregon – long before the 2020 fires in fact.

While he was working at Domain Serene, he met a winemaker from Italy at the International Pinot Noir Celebration in 2004, who told him about the white Pinot Noir production in his region.

‘When he was describing it, the light bulb just went off for me. He didn’t have the wine with him, and I never tasted it, but I thought that it was cool and I wanted to make one,’ said Rynders.

It has become one of the signature wines, and one that Rynders continued to make at Tendril after departing Domaine Serene in 2008. At Tendril Cellars, he calls it ‘Pretender’ because, ‘it’s Pinot Noir, but it pretends to be a white wine’, and sells around 175 cases a year – nearly all of it direct from the cellar door.

He continues: ‘With Pretender, we pick the grapes at full maturity when the fruit is just ripe enough to make red wine. That is how we achieve the rich texture of this wine.’

Rynders does partial pressing and yields only about 60% of the juice used to make the wine. The juice maintains the grapes’ natural acidity and preserves the pH. He then matures the wine in neutral French barrels for 16 months, longer than other producers in the region.

During that period, the wine loses whatever colour it might have acquired during pressing. ‘By not having any poppable colour in our white Pinot Noir allows us to add more shelf life to the wine, a little more of the ageing potential. If there is a colour in these wines, they don’t age as well as they could,’ Rynders explains.

He decided to go even further and officially obtain approval for White Pinot Noir on the label by lobbying the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

In 2004, with the first vintage of the wine, he presented the idea to the agency and explained what it was and how it was made. ‘It didn’t really fit into a neat box for them. They initially weren’t going to let us use the term “White Pinot Noir” until I was able to convince them that it was Pinot Noir, just made as a white wine; So it is a tangent of Pinot Noir,’ Rynders remembers.

Still from sparkling

White Pinot Noir is one of the additions that another winemaker in Willamette Valley, Jessica Mozeico, introduced to Et Fille Wines in 2022.

‘It was never on my radar, and I was vaguely familiar with the concept,’ says Mozeico. ‘However, when I started making sparkling wine, I loved the base wine from our Pinot. I thought if I like the aromatics and acidity of this base wine, why not make it into a still wine?’

Mozeico uses the same block of Pinot Noir grapes for rosé and sparkling wine planted in 2003. This side of the vineyard is cropped more heavily to prevent fast maturity and the leaves are left to provide shade.

The grapes for rosé and white Pinot Noir are harvested at the same time. At the winery, these two wines are processed almost identically.

When pressed, Mozeico seeks free-run juice to minimise skin contact. There have been years when she refused to make a white Pinot because she couldn’t drop the colour.

‘There are certain things that I am looking for in this wine,’ says Mozeico, ‘I am looking for white colour, stone fruit aromatics, nectarine, peach, and some early strawberries. But if it starts to get beyond that, I put it in the rosé category.’

A Washington white wine maverick

In Washington State’s Columbia Valley, there aren’t many producers working with Pinot Noir.

The region is largely characterised by hot growing conditions and is a preferred terroir for Bordeaux varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and has become well known for Syrah.

Massalto works with one of the few vineyards to grow the grape there, and it’s the only winery using it to make white wine.

‘It reminds me of a combination of Viognier and Chardonnay. Part of that is the barrel fermentation. But with the notes of stone fruits and citrus, Pinot Noir makes me think of a white wine, actually,’ says Matías Kúsulas, the co-founder of Massalto Wine.

After tasting a white Pinot in Oregon in 2018, Kúsulas and his business partner, Chef Michael Ruhland, decided to make one at Massalto from fruit grown at Solaksen Vineyard, part of the Lawrence Estate Vineyards, where Kúsulas makes the wines at Gård.

Massalto is becoming known for its unorthodox and innovative approach to winemaking (using techniques like pre-and/or extended post-fermentation maceration), evident in the white Pinot Noir.

Along with playing with the harvest time to further drive certain flavours in the wine, in the cellar, Kúsulas tinkers further, pressing whole bunches at different pressures, and choosing between partial and no malolactic fermentation.

All of this experimenting took the winemaker through several harvests before Kúsulas achieved the bold style he sought; something that ‘separates them from the others,’ he says.

​

The 2020 vintage eventually gave him what he was looking for.

Unlike previous years, the fruit was left to hang longer. After pressing, the juice went straight to the barrel and produced a completely different profile than they expected for white Pinot Noir. ‘Very rich, tons of stone fruit with a little bit of citrus, the viscosity, the texture was amazing! It was actually a very serious wine,’ says Kúsulas.

This became the way Massalto makes its white Pinot Noir called Facade. The label’s artwork is a woman with a mask, partially covering her face, like this red grape, pretending to be something else.

A selection of white Pinot Noir:

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Beyond the beguiling wines, there is a charm to the Willamette Valley that I haven’t found in other American wine regions. This is a place where small producers can still build something for themselves.

Access to vineyard land, or at the very least quality fruit, is not beyond the reach of an aspiring new producer.

As a result, the upper tier of the Willamette Valley is a place where longstanding producers of renown like Eyrie, Bethel Heights and Cristom have new peers like Martin Woods, Hundred Suns and Morgen Long.

Willamette is a winemaking community. A place where new producers are welcomed like old friends, and community trumps competition. It was that way in the beginning, and it remains that way today.

Three under-the-radar Willamette Valley producers to track

Granville Wine Co

Jackson Holstein is a second-generation winegrower in the Dundee Hills (his father, Allen, was one of the region’s pioneering winegrowers in the late 1970s), and he’s making brilliant wines at Granville Wine Co., which he owns with his wife, Ayla.

A farmer first, Holstein’s deft hand at winemaking is immediately obvious from his Pinot Noirs, Chardonnays and brilliant sparkling wines. Granville’s first vintage was a small production in 2014, when both were still working day jobs. In 2018, the winemaking got serious, with the Holsteins building a winery and upping production.

Holstein grew up here in the nascent days of the Willamette Valley and is fully aware of what that means.

‘It’s one thing to be a multigenerational producer in a region with centuries of wine-related history or culture, like in Piedmont or Burgundy,’ Holsteins reflects. ‘It’s entirely different when the culture is still being established and defined, like it is here in the Willamette Valley.

‘The previous generation of pioneers and dreamers did their part; now it’s our turn. We’re out to show the world that Oregon’s full potential hasn’t yet been realised. We’re really just getting started.’

Holstein feels a sense of duty to build on the work of those who came before him and his contemporaries. At Granville, he’s crafting wines that would surely make those pioneers proud.

Evesham Wood and Haden Fig

I don’t think there are better Pinot Noirs for the money, anywhere in the world, than the ones being made by Erin Nuccio. To be clear, these aren’t just great values; they’re great wines.

Nuccio fell into wine after college, working at a wine shop near his home in Arlington, Virginia. He found himself drawn to the wines of the Old World, and it was then that he tasted his first Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs.

A trip to Northern California, with a desire to learn to grow and make wine, eventually landed Nuccio in the Willamette Valley in 2007.

‘I became friends with Russ Rainey, the founder of Evesham Wood in the Eola-Amity Hills, and started apprenticing under him,’ explains Nuccio. ‘I produced my Haden Fig wines in the Evesham Wood warehouse. My plan was to slowly build an estate, so Russ and I would drive the hills looking at sites he thought would make great vineyards.

‘As I started making Pinot Noirs from different sites like Cancilla Vineyard and Mahonia Vineyard, I quickly realised that a big part of what makes the Willamette Valley so special is that the same grape can be grown on very similar sites, sometimes right next to each other, and produce wildly different expressions of Pinot Noir, Nuccio concludes.’

White Walnut Estate

Chris Mazepink arrived in the Willamette Valley in 2000 and worked at some of the region’s larger producers, including Archery Summit, Shea Wine Cellars, and Benton Lane. In those winemaking roles, his charge was to craft wines that adhered to established house styles.

‘I moved to the Willamette Valley, from New York, in the summer of 2000 to dive into my graduate studies in fermentation science and viticulture at Oregon State University,’ says Mazepink.

‘At the time, most wineries in Oregon didn’t even have websites, and frankly, I had just purchased my first cell phone, so that first job involved me faxing my resume to every winery I could find a fax number for – less than 50 in total! Frankly, at that point, the Oregon wine industry was a bit more of an in-state novelty. Fast forward to today, and we’re a globally recognised, qualitative epicentre for benchmark examples of both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.’

His White Walnut Estate, planted on the eastern flank of the Dundee Hills, was established in 2015 and 2016. The estate sits just below the Domaine Drouhin estate, on a former walnut orchard.

It is a complete departure from his previous work. Mazepink farms organically and biodynamically, and leans heavily into the Dundee Hills. ‘I’m the only producer in the region who is making wine with exclusively Dundee Hills fruit,’ he informs me.

Mazepink’s nine wines (four Chardonnays and five Pinot Noirs) are an exploration of the Dundee Hills terroir and an expression of his diverse farming. His approach as a winegrower has given him fantastic material to work with as a winemaker.

He has amassed a collection of various Pinot Noir and Chardonnay clones and has taken his ‘polyculture’ approach to planting his White Walnut and Apple Field estate sites.

His Worden Hill Road bottling is an exploration of sites along the thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the Dundee Hills. ‘The Dundee Hills are painted with too broad a brush,’ Mazepink says, ‘there are numerous non-fruit descriptors that I get from those sites.’

A more robust story of the Dundee Hills going beyond their signature fresh red fruits.

The Willamette Valley 2023 vintage rating: 5/5

The 2023 Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays alike show a consistency of quality, and as has been the case over the last few years, I find the Chardonnays showing slightly better.

The somewhat abrupt nature of the growing season meant winegrowers had to be ready come harvest time. You might see a couple of examples of wines where alcohol may have gotten away from people, but generally, there is an elegance that matches the vintage’s generosity.

Wines from rising Willamette Valley producers to have on your radar

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How much do you know about Oregon’s Willamette Valley and its origins as a famous growing region for superb Pinot Noir wines, as well as top Chardonnay?

Scroll down to test your level with our short Willamette Valley quiz, featuring five multiple-choice questions created by Decanter’s North America editor, Clive Pursehouse.

Decanter Premium subscribers can also read Pursehouse’s new, in-depth review of the Willamette Valley 2023 vintage, covering both Pinot Noir and also the best Chardonnay wines to look out for.

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‘Barely 1,000 acres [405ha] of Chardonnay vines existed in the entire state when we purchased our X Novo parcel in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in 2010,’ says Craig Williams of X Novo, one of the most sought-after Chardonnay sites in Oregon.

‘Pinot Gris acreage was almost three times greater. This lack of Chardonnay – a noble variety that produces world-class white wines – seemed at odds with the focus on other cool-climate grapes.’

‘In 1986, Chardonnay was 25% of the plantings in the Willamette Valley,’ says Chris Mazepink, owner and winemaker at White Walnut Estate in the Dundee Hills.

‘Today, it’s only 5%, but the quality has never been better, and you can argue that Chardonnay has now eclipsed Pinot Noir among the top bottlings.’

Scroll down to see Clive Pursehouse’s notes and scores for 20 of the best Chardonnays from Willamette Valley’s 2023 vintage

Slow burn

Chardonnay from Willamette Valley has taken a circuitous path to its current success.

The valley’s oldest Chardonnay vines are in the Eyrie vineyard, where a single hectare was planted by David Lett in 1966.

Lett had acquired cuttings in 1964 from Joe Torres, who at the time was the vineyard manager for the Draper Ranch in St Helena; they spent a year in the ground in a nursery block near Corvallis, Oregon, before being transplanted.

A little later in the same year, Charles Coury planted the 108 clone from the University of California, Davis at his vineyard. The vines at both sites, and many of the valley’s other pioneering Chardonnay plantings, were California ‘heritage’ clones.

While successful in California’s warmer conditions, they had difficulty ripening in the cool, wet, nascent days of the Willamette Valley wine industry.

The arrival of Dijon clones, spurred on by Willamette pioneer David Adelsheim, saw a rise in Chardonnay plantings and increasingly reliable ripening.

But then, as climate change began to affect the valley, those early plantings of California clones went from being unreliable to creating perhaps its most compelling Chardonnays.

‘When I first started in 2000, we had the 1998 and ’99 vintages and then that year,’ recalls Mazepink.

‘People were excited that we got Chardonnay ripe three years in a row. At the time, it was accepted that one in three would be a washout. Now everything gets sufficiently ripe – it’s not nearly as variable as it was.’

Burgundian influence

In 2007, Evening Land Vineyards hired Dominique Lafon to come from Burgundy and consult on its newly acquired project in the Eola-Amity Hills.

His vision single-handedly changed the way Oregon producers approached Chardonnay. Rather than chasing ripeness, the focus shifted to picking earlier to preserve acidity and freshness.

Among his early devotees was Ken Pahlow (pictured, above), whose Walter Scott label now produces some of the valley’s top Chardonnays every vintage.

The modern-day Willamette Valley Chardonnay is one of balance, gorgeously rich texture and fruited depth that I often characterise as ‘lemon curd’, and a soaring freshness, of both acidity and minerality.

The Pacific ocean’s influence lends a saline throughline to these well-made Chardonnays, irrespective of producer.

Meanwhile, the creation of regional signatures has been assisted by the use of reductive winemaking (minimising exposure to oxygen) and, in some circles, the adoption of the ‘black Chardonnay’ technique.

This is a name now being applied to a production method that involves vigorous crushing of the grapes and ample aeration, which causes the must to turn rapidly to a dark brown or ‘black’ colour; the aim is to increase both the texture of the wine and its capacity for ageing, while also fending off oxidation once in the bottle.

London’s A&B Vintners has gone all-in on the Willamette Valley and its Chardonnays. Says buying director Simon Davies: ‘I think what Oregon does spectacularly well is compete at that mid-to upper level with white Burgundy.

‘The likes of Morgen Long, Crowley, Abbott Claim, Martin Woods and Arterberry Maresh, among others, are all producing wines that are intense, ageworthy and exhibit incredible uniqueness of site.’

François Millet made wine for more than three decades at Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé, the iconic Chambolle-Musigny estate.

He speaks more like a poet than a winemaker and treats terroir with a deeply personal approach.

2023 marked his first vintage in the Willamette Valley, making the wines at La Biblioteca in Dundee. While he likens terroir to personalities, Millet thinks of vintages as similar to a mood.

‘The mood of the 2023 vintage in the Willamette Valley was determined but with generosity,’ he says.

‘It’s positive and determined, sure, but still very elegant. It’s not at all aggressive and has allowed for wines to be quite beautiful.’

100-point Oregon!

A ‘sweet spot’ is how I would characterise 2023 in the Willamette Valley – its cool beginnings akin to 2022 and its warm, dry finish similar to 2021.

The conditions, together with the rising tide of Chardonnay in the valley, delivered the first 100-point wine from Oregon in Decanter’s history: Bethel Heights, The High Wire Chardonnay 2023, a simply mesmerising wine from own-rooted Wente clone vines planted in 1977.

‘When my family purchased the property in 1978, these vines were just a year old – fragile sticks in the ground,’ says winemaker Ben Casteel. ‘Ripening them was a challenge every vintage, spanning my late father’s entire career and the first eight years of mine.

‘Over the years, they had every chance to replant with an earlier-ripening variety, but they chose patience,’ he continues. ‘That patience is what brought us to this moment, 47 years later.’

Pursehouse’s top Willamette Valley 2023 Chardonnay

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The wines that were made from the 2023 vintage in Oregon’s Willamette Valley are beautiful.

They readily offer the elegance and delicacy for which cool-climate Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are known throughout the wine world. These are remarkable wines.

The results of a growing season that started cool and slow, and ended rapidly, there’s a grace and refinement stamped across them, from their aromatics to their polished finishes.

And there’s a precocious nature to them, too: perfect for those without patience.

Scroll down to see notes and scores for 20 of the finest Pinot Noirs from Willamette Valley’s 2023 vintage

Willamette Valley 2023: 5/5

The 2023 Willamette Valley Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs show equally consistent quality, but as has been the case over the last few years, I find that the Chardonnays are showing slightly better.

The somewhat abrupt nature of the end of the growing season meant that wine-growers had to be ready come harvest time. You might see a few examples of wines where alcohol hasn’t been kept under control, but generally, there’s an elegance to match the generosity of the vintage.

Cool customer

The past three Willamette Valley vintages, 2021 to 2023, feel like a payback of sorts for the disastrous 2020.

The 2021s showed a readiness that allowed for prompt release to make up for the lost inventories created by the 2020 wildfires, while the long, cool 2022 vintage showcased the true beauty of the Willamette Valley.

It’s a properly cool climate, with prime growing conditions extending late into October, which in 2023 meant the wines could be picked at perfection, particularly for those of us who love the cooler years, such as 2019, 2011, 2010 and 2007.

Perhaps 2023 has trumped both 2021 and 2022 – almost a perfect blend of the two, offering the elegance and refinement for which the region is known, coupled with generosity and early availability.

‘The velocity of the vintage was the theme for 2023,’ says Ken Pahlow, owner and winemaker at Walter Scott.

Willamette Valley experienced its shortest period from bud break to bloom, which typically takes about 60 days; in 2023, it was reduced to about 40.

The cool spring was then moved along quickly by very warm May weather. Onésimo ‘Ony’ Mora and his brothers farm more than 20ha in the Willamette Valley.

‘I wouldn’t describe 2023 as a hot vintage, but it was definitely on the dry side,’ Mora explains. ‘When bud break started in April, things seemed pretty “normal” by recent Willamette standards.’

Rapid ripening

‘In June, suddenly we felt that it was coming on fast,’ Mora continues.

‘For us, it meant we immediately needed to do the same work at all of the different vineyards we’re managing, almost at the same time. If we get behind on our hand labour or our organic sprays, then it’s possible we don’t ever really catch back up. We managed to stay on top of it, but barely.’

‘As harvest neared, the “optimal” weather pattern continued, advancing ripeness for us in every site very uniformly,’ recalls Pahlow.

‘Instead of picking over several weeks, it was very compressed. Capturing freshness where things went quickly was the primary driver. Everything got ripe at the same time. We picked several sites on the same day. That’s never happened before.’

The same logistical issues that the Mora brothers dealt with in the vines were faced by winemakers such as Pahlow in cellars up and down the valley, as all of their fruit came in at almost exactly the same time.

Tomorrow: The concluding part of the report and reviews of the best Chardonnays

Top 10 wines of the vintage:

Bethel Heights, The High Wire Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 100pts

Martin Woods, Hyland Vineyard Pinot Noir, McMinnville 99pts

Granville, Koosah Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 98pts

Walter Scott, Koosah Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 98pts

White Walnut Vineyard, Estate Chardonnay, Dundee Hills 98pts

Beaux Fréres, Rogue Vines Chardonnay, Ribbon Ridge 97pts

Crowley, Phoebe Chardonnay, Willamette Valley, 97pts

Goodfellow Family Cellars, Richard’s Cuvée Chardonnay, Ribbon Ridge, 97pts

Cristom, Jessie Vineyard Pinot Noir, Eola-Amity Hills, 97pts

Evesham Wood, Cuvée J Pinot Noir, Eola-Amity Hills, 97pts

Pursehouse’s 20 great Pinot buys from 2023

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In the Pacific Northwest, there are two larger wine regions. The Willamette Valley in Oregon, and much of Washington’s wine country within the Columbia Valley.

While the two regions may be somewhat proximate, the dynamic topography, namely the Cascade Mountain range, leaves them worlds apart in terms of the growing conditions and the style of wines they produce.

One produces, mainly anyway, cool climate grapes long known to hail from Burgundy in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and Washington’s Columbia Valley is mostly an arid, desert climate where you can grow anything from Riesling to Cabernet Sauvignon.

Oregon’s Willamette Valley in full swing

John Grochau, who makes the wines at his own GC Wines, as well as for a few other brands in the Willamette Valley, finds similarities between this year and a recent vintage. ‘I think this vintage is going to look pretty similar to 2023, when it’s all said and done,’ Grochau concluded. ‘We had a warm, steady and dry summer, producing small grapes with thick skins. We have a lighter crop this year, with some good concentration in the berries.’

It was, in general, a steady growing season, but things ramped up in August.

‘In late August, we had quite a bit of heat, advancing sugars in the grapes ahead of phenolic ripeness,’ Grochau said. ‘I was getting concerned about having to rush to pick, but some cool weather came in on the 6 September, and a bit of rain came in and slowed it down perfectly, giving the fruit more balance.’

September will be a busy one up and down the Willamette Valley, with cooler sites being picked towards the end of the month, while some of the warmer spots and particular varieties came off the vine in September’s first few days.

‘Our first pick was Albariño from the Columbia River Gorge on Friday, September 5, Grochau recalled. ‘We started harvesting Pinot Noir for red wine on September 10, and will likely be picking every day for the next few weeks. The grapes are coming along fast. The rest of September will be very intense, processing lots of fruit and working through the logistics of getting everything in at the right time in a small winery.’

Staying steady in Washington State

In the hot and dry conditions that are perennially a part of a desert growing season, winemakers concern themselves with things like dehydration and heat spikes, but so far, 2025 has really played ball.

‘2025 has been beautiful thus far, and we have a finish line in sight,’ reported Seth Kitzke, of Upsidedown Wine, sourcing from Washington’s Yakima Valley.

‘The spring warmed up quicker than anticipated and was pretty dry. This early warmth expedited our time through bloom and fruit set, requiring some serious attention to detail early on. This year we lacked the moisture that is usually present in our northern-facing sites, so we had to intervene a little earlier than usual.’

While things got off to a fairly rapid start, they slowed to a steady pace, letting the grapes take the time they needed so that phenolic ripeness wasn’t lagging behind sugar accumulation.

‘The warm spring had me worried for a bit about a hot year, but we tapered off to a very average year that has just been consistent. Without big stretches of high heat and only a handful of days over 100° (37.7 °C), the vines didn’t ever seem to fully shut down,’ Kitzke said.

‘I think this, combined with an earlier fruit set, really made for amazing depth and flavours early. The fruit has been tasting good since the start of August, which is unusual.’

Even though steady growing conditions have been the rule, there are a few curveballs that are keeping Washington winemakers on their toes.

‘The yields, specifically in our Tremasi Vineyard on Red Mountain, are really low for our Syrah,’ Kitzke reported.

‘I think that perhaps the warm spring gave the Syrah a harder time.

‘Cabernet Franc, I think, could be another varietal to keep an eye on. It coloured up very early, and the phenolics were ahead of Cabernet and Merlot for us. We already have two picks of CF in the door. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why some varieties are ready before others this year.

‘You kinda have to throw your typical picking order schedule out the window this year and trust your palate!’

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While wine writers – yours truly included – have yet to give the final verdict on the 2023 vintage, auction attendees found plenty to be excited about at the live and silent auctions held on 14-15 May, co-hosted by Zachy’s.

One of the seminars hosted on day one, which I moderated, presented some of the Willamette Valley‘s top names in winemaking. Celebrated Chardonnay producer Ken Pahlow of Walter Scott and Antica Terra’s Maggie Harrison, as well as Adelsheim’s Gina Hennen and Daniel Estrin of Cristom, described the growing season and the resulting wines bidders would taste and vie for over the two days.

The new two-day format included consumers by invite, as well as industry buyers. Sparkling wines and single-case bidding increments were also introduced. This year’s event raised an impressive $614,115 through sponsorship, ticket sales and lot sales to support the Willamette Valley Wineries Association’s marketing, branding and education initiatives.

The top lot, which sold for $30,000, was also the final of the two-day affair: Lot #32 from Alexana Winery. Tresider Burns crafted the special, auction-only Pinot Noir from the Alexana Dundee Hills estate.

Included for the winner was ‘The Ultimate Revana Blending Table Experience’. The top bidder would join owner Dr Madaiah Revana and winemakers at both the Willamette Valley’s Alexana Estate and Revana Estate in the Napa Valley at the blending table to create rare bottlings of Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, including dinners and a deep dive into Dr Revana’s considerable personal cellar.

Other highlights and top-selling lots included:

• Lot #24: 2023 Antica Terra Alder Creek Pinot Noir – selling for $25,000
• Lot #18 2023 Bethel Heights Kaleidoscope Chardonnay – which went for $18,000

And from the Online Auction: It Takes A Valley – $10,000. This was a package for four offering rare, behind-the-scenes access to Willamette Valley wine country including vineyard stays, private tastings and immersive winemaker experiences.

The 2023 vintage, marked by a cool start and a relatively rapid and steady growing season, saw healthy yields and moderate alcohol levels. If my early tastings are any indication, it displays a fairly immediate elegance while showing all the markers of ageability.

‘The calibre of wines showcased this year was nothing short of world-class,’ said Joshua Wludyka, auction chair and brand director at Lingua Franca.

‘These wines represent the depth, diversity, and precision of Willamette Valley winemaking — each one a testament to the remarkable talent and terroir of our region. We’re incredibly grateful to the attendees, bidders, and supporters who helped bring this celebration to life.’

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Deep Purple said, ‘April is a cruel time’ in the bizarre 12-minute song, April, the last track on their third album, brilliantly titled Deep Purple III.

Respectfully, I disagree. April can be a great time, as spring brings slumbering greenery to life, and opportunities to visit wine regions, near, like the Dundee Hills and far, like Croatia’s Kvarner region, came my way, I embraced April, despite Deep Purple’s jaded take on the month.

Oh, and New York City was in there too, how can I forget? I was there to promote our New York Fine Wine Encounter, on 7 June. Less than a month away!

Scroll down for scores and reviews of Clive’s selection of wines from his April tastings

Come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs

I had got word through the grapevine that the Croatian national government wanted to honour the scribblings of yours truly, so who was I to say no?

All kidding aside, the Croatian tourism board gave me the Gold Pen Award for my coverage of the country’s wines in 2024, so off to Istria I went.

A side journey to the region of Kvarner opened up yet another gem in that country’s fascinating array of growing regions, principally centered around the island of Krk.

I was able to taste and dine with a few of Kvarner’s producers and visit the region’s largest vineyard, planted to Zlahtina. A white indigenous variety. Croatia has over 100 such wine varieties originating in this diverse growing region.

This is a country I’ve been visiting for almost a decade, and I continue to be impressed with the direction the wines are taking. If you’ve never been to Croatia, its food, wine and immense natural beauty are a great reason to visit.

I did a little truffle hunting and sightseeing in a storybook town called Grožjnan, a charming village high in the Istrian hills. Our awards ceremony was held at the Kozlović winery, who make some of the country’s best white wines. It was a whirlwind, but the kind you enjoy.

The Dundee Hills turns 20

The Dundee Hills Winegrowers Association invited me to help them celebrate their 20th birthday. They can legally start drinking their own product next year.

We hosted a panel for consumers and industry members alike to look back at where Oregon Pinot Noir got its start, and forward to the undeniably bright future.

I was joined on the panel by pioneering winegrowing Allen Holstein, second-generation Dundee Hills growers Jesse Lange and Paul Durant and one of the region’s rising stars, winemaker Kate Payne Brown.

Anytime I’m down in the Willamette, I try to schedule a few tastings. For my quick one-day visit, I shoehorned in two exciting stops. First up was Abbott Claim, where the very talented Alban Debeaulieu is making the wines, including my top wine of last year’s Decanter Top 50 US Wines.

I find his 2022 vintage wines, particularly a couple of his Chardonnays, to be exhilarating, as you’ll see below, the Temperance Hill bottling really captivated me.

He also told me about a special project the folks at Abbott Claim are working on. From there, I checked in with Craig Williams of X Novo, the longtime brains behind Joseph Phelps.

He left California behind for the wilds of Oregon. Williams has planted a couple of vineyards in the Eola-Amity Hills from which winemakers are clamouring to source fruit.

The X Omni site, in particular, makes electrifying Chardonnay.

The Big Apple

The last trip of my whirlwind April was New York City for a little event promotion. As the only full-time Decanter person in the country, someone’s gotta do it, and well, that someone is me.

After sharing a natural wine at Frenchette with our columnist Eliza Dumais, I hosted a couple of cool Decanter events. One was a dinner at the famed Carlyle hotel, just across from Central Park, where I highlighted the American wines that were among the top in the 2024 DWWA judging.

They included an array of Chardonnays and a top-rated Pinot Noir, a Best in Show wine from Oregon’s Audeant.

My trip was rounded out by a fantastic tasting at Millesima, where we previewed our Fine Wine Encounter masterclasses from Veuve Cliquot, Biondi Santi and the Rioja DOCa.

I also hit up a few pizza places, including my favourite, Scarr’s. Let’s grab a slice together if you’re coming to our Fine Wine Encounter.

Further highlights

This month, my wine highlights included several bottles from the Willamette Valley. In addition to the Abbott Claim, the 00Wines, X Novo, and Granville bottles were serious standouts.

I was really taken by the Love & Squalor Temperance Hill Pinot Noir. With a little age on it, it’s loaded with elegance.

The 2022 vintage from Reynvaan Family Vineyards, largely in The Rocks District, shows tremendous balance with that regional depth. There were a couple of California wines from Ridge Vineyards and Tablas Creek also got my attention.

You can see all the wines we taste in our Decanter database.

If you don’t subscribe to our weekly US newsletter, you can do so here.

Clive’s selection of 10 top wines from April

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Buy tickets to Decanter Fine Wine Encounter New York

Don and Wendy Lange found a 30-acre (12 ha) parcel on the eastern knoll of the Dundee Hills, which did not become an appellation until 2005. They set down roots, planting their first vines in 1988, and establishing Lange Estate.

The Langes’ journey to become one of the early pieces of the Willamette Valley wine puzzle was a circuitous one.

Scroll down for notes and scores of a deep Lange Estate vertical

Don Lange, originally from Iowa, is an accomplished musician. In his heyday, he collaborated with artists like John Prine, Steve Goodman, and Pete Seeger in Chicago’s vibrant folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

Don was a singer-songwriter before the category had a name, recording three of his own albums and penning songs for a group of successful folk singers.

Relocating to California, Don met Wendy and the two became committed to the notion of making wine. First, they were fixed on Zinfandel before turning their attention to Pinot Noir.

They credit a bottle of Morey St Denis with showing them what wine could really be, and after that, the pair became fixated on where you could make such a wine in the New World.

Don worked at Sanford & Benedict, a Pinot Noir producer that founded the wine industry in Santa Barbara County, when a chance encounter with Oregon Pinot Noir changed everything.

Wendy had raised the idea of Oregon, but they weren’t totally convinced.

A pair of dusty bottles

‘I was grocery shopping,’ says Don about how he discovered the potential for Pinot Noir in Oregon. It was 1987, and Don Lange found two bottles of Oregon Pinot Noir on the bottom shelf of a local grocery store ‘on the mesa in Santa Barbara,’ he says.

The bottles were dusty, ‘they were at least six years old,’ recalls Don.

The two wines presented a lightbulb moment: a 1979 Erath Pinot Noir from the Maresh Vineyard and a 1980 Eyrie Vineyards, both coming from the region’s founding appellation, the Dundee Hills.

There was a phone number on the back of the Erath bottle, and Wendy encouraged Don to reach out. ‘She said, well, just call him up, so I got up from the dinner table and called the number’ he recalls he’d end up speaking to one of the very early pioneers of the Willamette, Dick Erath.

‘Eventually, someone handed him the phone, and Dick was like you should come up. Three weeks later, we were up here.’

Upon arrival, they drove the length of the valley, starting in the far south, before they realised that the region’s wine epicentre was well to the north. The Lange estate vineyard is just a few hills over from the old vine sites responsible for those two bottles.

‘In hindsight, I guess those bottles were pointing the way all along,’ Don says.

The early days of Lange Estate

The Langes discovered the Pinots of Oregon and visited in the spring of 1987; by June, they had moved to the Dundee Hills. ‘We made wine as soon as we got here, from purchased grapes. We just wanted to get a toe hold and get started as soon as we could,’ Don remembers.

They made wine in the basement of the house that first year.

The property they acquired came with six plantable acres (2.5 hectares) below the house, all of it with southeast-facing slopes, which made Don think of the Côte d’Or.

The estate is a combination of Dijon clones and cuttings that Don brought from the Sta Rita site, Bien Nacido.

‘It was really mostly Douglas fir and hazelnut orchards when we got here,’ says Wendy Lange. The Lange family arrived to a nascent industry that was still fighting to be understood.

While they made wine, they managed to cobble together a living. Wendy worked at the Erath tasting room, and Don, who held an MFA degree, taught music at some local community colleges and performed with his guitar in the evenings.

‘There were several challenges, people had no idea how to pronounce Oregon, let alone the fact that we were making fine wines here,’ Don recalls. The Langes credit the hard work and support of the early pioneers for their success.

It was an industry that was built on an ethic of collaboration and cooperation. The early pioneers welcomed the growing winemaking community, sharing their knowledge of the region and learning from each other’s collective successes and failures.

Later down the line, in 1987, the Drouhin family from Burgundy bought some land. The New York Times wrote a story about the Pinot Noir from Ponzi Vineyards in the late 1990s.

People were beginning to take notice, and take Oregon Pinot Noir seriously.

Lange Estate at a glance:

Founded: 1987, first vines planted in 1988

Estate Vineyards: Legacy (original vines), Mia Block, Redside and Lucky River

Winemakers: Jesse Lange, Executive winemaker, Don Lange

Noteworthy wines: Classique Pinot Noir, Freedom Hill Pinot Noir, Lucky River Pinot Noir, Reserve Pinot Gris

A commitment to Pinot Gris

‘We drank some Grigios in Santa Barbara,’ Don recollects, ‘but they were pretty simple wines.’

His impression of the variety changed dramatically upon the Langes’ arrival in Oregon.

‘Eyrie, Ponzi, Adelsheim were making Pinot Gris and those wines really got my attention. Wow, this is different,’ he says.

With freshly planted vines but no fruit, the Langes purchased grapes from their neighbours.

‘There was a vineyard, just over those trees,’ Don says, motioning to the east. ‘They asked if we were interested in buying any Pinot Gris, and I said, of course.’

‘He put that in puncheons, and so we were the first to make barrel fermented Pinot Gris in the country,’ adds Jesse.

Even as much of the Willamette has shifted to focus on Chardonnay, Lange, along with Eyrie and Ponzi in particular, remain at the forefront of a serious, ageworthy style of Oregon Pinot Gris.

The second generation

As the second generation, Jesse Lange joined the family business in 2004. As affable a winemaker as you’ll meet, Jesse is fully engaged in both the family estate and the success of the Dundee Hills appellation.

‘We’re a 40-year, overnight success,’ says Jesse about the well-earned reputation of the wines of the Dundee Hills.

At the same time, Don and Wendy still play a significant role as the ‘consulting winemakers’, with 40 years of experience at the estate.

Jesse has brought a considerable technical wine background back to the family estate after stints in Santa Barbara and New Zealand.

The holdings have grown from the original 30 acres to 60 planted acres (36ha) in the Dundee Hills. The Langes recently acquired the Lucky River vineyard, an additional 65-acre site.

The Pinot Noirs are considerable examples of Classic Willamette Valley, aligned with Don’s mantra of, ‘balance, structure and texture. Wines that you take to the table,’ to hear Don say it.

They are evocative of place and a winemaking acumen that has been learned and transmitted over the years in the Dundee Hills.

The Pinot Gris remains among the best examples in the Willamette Valley.

Lange Estate vertical

Wines are listed in vintage order from oldest to youngest

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Rollin Soles got the ball rolling on sparkling wine at Oregon’s Argyle back in 1987. Who knows if – more than three decades ago – he could have foreseen the growth and quality of the wine style’s production in the Willamette Valley.

There are now around 100 sparkling producers in the valley, based on self-reporting to the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, and that number seems to grow by the week.

A sparkling sweet spot

Oregon’s reputation for fantastic wines is built on the varieties of Burgundy, which, it turns out, are partly the same as Champagne. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay do so well in Oregon; so perhaps naturally, sparkling wine has sparked serious interest from Oregon’s winemakers.

‘I think that the Willamette Valley’s potential for high-quality sparkling is a pretty natural outcome for a region already producing spectacular Pinot Noir and Chardonnay,’ says WillaKenzie Estate winemaker Erik Kramer.

‘Oregon has an ideal climate for growing grapes for sparkling wines,’ says Rachel Healow, associate winemaker for the sparkling house, Argyle. ‘Because sparkling grapes are harvested at lower ripeness, making sparkling wine allows us to begin our harvest season earlier, in the late summer. The cool nights and mornings create ideal conditions for retaining acid – vital to our sparkling wines.’

Scroll down for scores and reviews for Oregon Sparkling wines for NYE

Talent bubbles over

In addition to the right conditions, the talent is here, a vital part of any fine wine region’s success.

‘I think Oregon is one of the most exciting places to make wine right now,’ says Bryn Mawr Vineyards winemaker Rachel Rose. ‘This has attracted a considerable amount of talent and winemakers with significant technical skill. The sparkling wine producers I know use high-quality parcels of land, farm their fruit with exceptional precision, and spare no expense in the pursuit of making the best wine possible.’

‘Having a degree of intentionality built into the vision for a high-quality sparkling programme is essential,’ says WillaKenzie’s Kramer. ‘In other words, working with appropriate vineyard locations, farming intentionally for sparkling, and having a clear stylistic vision can tee a wine up for success from inception.’

A radiant future

While he has no interest in taking credit for anyone’s wine, Radiant Sparkling Wine Company owner Andrew Davis is a big part of the sparkling renaissance in the Willamette Valley. Davis contracts with small and not-so-small producers and provides the niche and often prohibitively expensive equipment that has allowed several wineries to begin experimenting and perfecting their own sparkling production.

Davis started Radiant in the spring of 2014 and has grown up to 36 clients he works with from start to finish, along with another dozen or so he helps with parts of the process, like disgorgement.

After getting his sparkling-wine-focused oenology degree in New Zealand, Davis returned to Oregon, where he began his undergraduate studies and was soon making wine alongside Rollin Soles, Oregon’s bubbly pioneer at Argyle. Over the years, Davis received many requests for help making bubbles: ‘No one had the special machinery required because the production was so small, so I sort of risked everything on Radiant and hoped the valley would support it.’

Sure enough, the response has been overwhelming.

‘The potential here is tremendous,’ Davis says. ‘For every iconic Old World region, there is a New World region standing toe to toe with it. For Cabernet, you think of Bordeaux but also Napa Valley. For Burgundy, I think of the Willamette Valley; many people would say Central Otago. However, no one has really challenged Champagne, but I think the Willamette Valley can do that.’

‘Quite simply, we’re cooler in the Willamette Valley than Champagne is these days. Things have warmed up there, and the night-time temperatures aren’t getting down to where they really want them. They’re struggling to keep their acidities up. We don’t have that problem at all. I’m actually nudging people to pick a little bit later, in some cases when we’re seeing ripping acidities.’

The virtue of patience

The Willamette Valley’s sparkling wines are second to none from my broader tastings when it comes to US regions producing the style. The ripeness is there, and the freshness is undeniable, giving a balance between fruit, minerality and a bright, fresh finish. Demand is high, and winemakers can disgorge on demand and sell out of it almost immediately.

However, as winemakers seek to elevate the sparkling wines and the region, extended tirage (lees ageing) is coming to the fore.

‘When the vision for WillaKenzie Estate’s Éclatant Brut was first conceptualised, it was pretty clear that we were going for a minimum of four years en tirage [ageing on the lees] from the outset,’ explains Kramer.

‘The initial concept for our Éclatant Brut was to bottle non-vintage with 10-15% of the blend being made up of a reserve component.

‘The wines are more complex and interesting, [due to] a portion of the blend coming from the reserve. The Éclatant Brut that will be disgorged in the summer of 2025 has a reserve component of 11% and will have been en tirage for four years.’

‘To me, as these wines age en tirage, those autolytic ageing characteristics, which people associate with the finer Champagne, really show beautifully in the wines from the Willamette Valley. These wines will get serious critical attention,’ said Davis.

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Exclusively for Decanter Premium subscribers, North American Editor Clive Pursehouse comes to London fresh on the heels of his Willamette Valley 2022 vintage report to share his exuberance for the region with Decanter’s London readers in advance of Decanter’s London Fine Wine Encounter.

Join Clive and Simon Davies of A&B Vintners for a lively conversation and in-depth look at some of the top Pinot Noir and Chardonnays from this Oregon region.

An impressive selection of wines from the A&B Vintners catalogue will be poured, chosen specifically for this occasion by our North American Editor and A&B’s proprietor, Davies.

Guests will be treated to a special evening of rich conversation about the region’s top sub-appellations, Oregon Chardonnay’s ascent, and which rising star producers these two regional experts are most excited about.

The culinary team at Lorne has prepared a four-course prix-fixe menu that perfectly pairs with the selected wines.

Tickets are available at this Decanter exclusive link: Lorne x Decanter Wine Dinner.

Discover the best of the Willamette Valley at Lorne!

Date: 14 November

Time: 6:30 pm

Location: Lorne restaurant, (76 Wilton Rd, Pimlico, London)

Menu:

Starter: Cured salmon & rillettes, crème fraîche, cucumber, orange &shallot dressing (gluten, dairy)

Middle: Potato gnocchi with cauliflower purée, caper, raisin & almond dressing, Pecorino (gluten, dairy, egg, nuts)

Main: Cornish chicken with polenta, hispi cabbage, hazelnut pesto, Madeira sauce, smoked bone marrow (dairy, egg, nuts)

Cheese: Selection of hard cheeses (dairy, gluten)

Wines being poured will include:

Morgen Long, Durant Vineyard Chardonnay, Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, 2021

Martin Woods, Yamhill Valley Vineyard Chardonnay, McMinnville, Willamette Valley, 2021

Sequitur, Chardonnay, Ribbon Ridge, Willamette Valley, 2021

Abbott Claim, Abbott Claim Vineyard Pinot Noir, Yamhill-Carlton, Willamette Valley, 2021

Arterberry Maresh, Old Vines Pinot Noir; Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, 2019

Brick House, Halliday Hill Pinot Noir, Ribbon Ridge, Willamette Valley, 2018

JK Carriere Wines, St Dolores Estate Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, 2016

Hope Well Wine, Chenin Blanc Hunter’s Moon, Eola-Amity Hills, Willamette Valley 2021

Related articles

• Oregon vintage report: Tricky Willamette Valley 2022 sticks the landing
• Oregon vintage 2022: Best Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs under $50
• Oregon’s Willamette Valley 2022: Chardonnay report and 20 wines to try

Living in the Pacific Northwest, I think of 2024 as a relatively steady, somewhat cool summer, with a few hot days but no notable anomalies.

I recognise that the weather where I live in Seattle is a bit different than that they receive in the Willamette Valley, and vastly different than that on the eastern side of Washington State, where it has been a very hot summer almost the whole time.

Checking in with winemakers throughout the region has revealed an interesting tale of two growing seasons: a long, steady, warm summer in Oregon and a steady, hot one in Washington State.

Washington

On Red Mountain, third-generation JJ Williams of Kiona Vineyards has seen the warm temperatures finally starting to cool down.

‘Sauvignon Blanc is always our first pick,’ Williams said. ‘And that was 5 September this year. 2024 feels like a 2.0 version of 2021 (considered a hot year). Fruit quality is high, and daytime temperatures have started to cool over the last week, so things are progressing at a nice, gradual pace.

‘The skies are always clear and sunny on Red Mountain, but the lower temperatures have been lovely for the fruit and our crew. This is the first full vintage under the care of our vineyard manager, Javier Ponce. He has worked closely with (and taken over from) Scott, my father, and his 50 years of Red Mountain experience.’

Things on Red Mountain will start wrapping up soon.

‘We’re not planning to do an ice wine this year; instead, we are allocating all of our Estate Chenin Blanc to our Columbia Valley Old Vine Chenin, which changes our timeline,’ Williams said.

‘Usually, our harvest end depends on when it freezes, and we never know. This year, our last blocks will be picked by mid-October. Our old-vine “1975 Old Block” on the estate came in on 14 October last year, and we think it will be close to that.’

On the far eastern side of Washington State, Kelsey Albro Itämeri is owner and winemaker at itä wines in the Walla Walla Valley, focusing on wines from the eastern foothills of the Blue Mountains.

She brings a restrained style that matches the moderation and finesse of the higher-elevation sites she works with.

‘We picked our first fruit, Sémillon, from Les Collines Vineyard on 28 August,’ Albro Itämeri shared.

‘We’re already almost all in (as of 17 September) with just Primitivo for rosé hanging, which we’ll pick by 23 September, and then half a ton of Petit Verdot that is always our last one in – it gets blended into our Merlot. We might pick that in October, but it is absolutely within the realm of possibility that we’ll be done picking by the end of September.

‘I’m really excited about the quality of the fruit this year. As an acid head, this year has been turning out to be my dream. There are lovely flavours with lots of snappy acidity to balance out. Malic acid levels are also pretty high, meaning that with the red wines, we’ll have the opportunity to soften that, especially by going through full or partial malolactic, depending on how things taste.’

Brad Sorensen is the viticulturist at Les Collines Vineyard, one of Walla Walla’s famed vineyard sites. ‘We were relieved that after a very warm summer, temperatures came down as we started harvest,’ Sorenson said.

‘It allows flavours to continue to develop as sugar accumulation slows down. The quality of the fruit looks excellent this year, with almost no issues with disease or damage from the sun or heat.’

Oregon’s Willamette Valley

Gina Hennen is the director of winemaking and viticulture at Adelsheim Vineyard, a Willamette Valley legacy winery founded by living legend David Adelsheim.

‘So far, this vintage has been absolutely dreamy,’ Hennen said. ‘We’ve had highs in the low to mid-70s and mostly sunny skies for the last few weeks. Because of those conditions, we are seeing a glacially slow pace of ripening, and sugar accumulation is happening much slower than our “new normal”.

‘That means we can get longer hang time for enhanced flavour development without the typical compromise of losing acid or creating too much potential alcohol. Over the last week, we’ve been rather casually picking Chardonnay and our earlier ripening Pinot Noir.

‘The weather outlook suggests more of the same in the coming weeks, so we’re happy to keep picking slowly as our estate vineyards gradually move into the ripening window. At this stage, my biggest concern is keeping our harvest interns busy, but that’s a luxurious problem to have.’

Jessica Mozeico, of Et Fille Wines, said: ‘The mid-September cooling in the Willamette Valley has been a complete gift. Up until the beginning of September, we were trending above the Growing Degree Days (GDD) average of the last 30 years.

‘That worried me because if it continued the warm weather would have increased sugar levels, and that could have necessitated harvesting before phenolic ripeness and flavour development were ready.

‘Temperatures dipping into the 50s (10°C) at night and peaking in the 70s (21°C) have slowed sugar ripening, and we’re letting phenolics and flavours catch up. Cool and dry conditions in late September and into October that allow hanging time maturation are ideal.’

Hennen added: ‘Right now, ripening is happening slowly, and acids aren’t dropping quickly. I think the 2024 vintage will be characterised by lovely and vibrant fruit flavours, low alcohol and ample acidity – a classic Willamette Valley vintage worth collecting. This plays right into the Adelsheim style, so I’m definitely looking forward to this year’s wines.’

Related articles

• Composition: A Willamette Valley project from DRC’s Bertrand de Villaine and Katrina Rank
• Chardonnay from Oregon’s Dundee Hills
• Oregon vintage report: Tricky Willamette Valley 2022 sticks the landing

The Willamette Valley is unquestionably one of the world’s great Pinot Noir (and I’d argue Chardonnay) regions.

For those who remain sceptical, I would point to the long track record that the region’s founding producers, like Eyrie, Ponzi, Bethel Heights, and Sokol Blosser (to name only a few), have in producing quality Pinot Noir vintage after vintage.

Likewise, many second-generation winemakers continue to elevate the Willamette Valley’s profile. Second-wave producers like Beaux Frères and Cristom Vineyards have only added to the region’s growing reputation for quality and consistency.

Scroll down for top-scoring Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs of the 2022 vintage all under $50

The tide has long risen

In addition to the longstanding classics, the current wave of great Willamette Valley winemakers is tremendous. Names like Alban Debeaulieu at Abbott Claim, Grant Coulter of Hundred Suns, Granville’s Jackson Holstein, Kate Payne Brown now at Ambar Estate and the inimitable second-generation winemaker Jimmy Maresh, who grew up in the vine rows in the Dundee Hills.

It is no longer a surprise to anyone who follows the world of wine that this region and its top talents are producing some of the greatest Pinot Noirs in the world – and ones that offer considerable value.

For the 2022 Willamette Valley vintage report, I tasted nearly 300 wines from the region’s many sub-appellations and those labelled with a broader Willamette Valley designation. Of all those wines, only one was noticeably more than $100 (£77), at around $125. Many of the vintage’s top-rated wines are available for between $45 and $85.

Where I truly believe the Willamette Valley can astound any Pinot Noir aficionado is in the under $50 (£37) category.

A commitment to quality

‘I think that a commitment to high-level winemaking makes for outstanding entry-level wines,’ says Jimmy Maresh of Arterberry Maresh, who produced what one of the top three wines of the 2022 vintage.

His Arterberry Maresh Dundee Hills Pinot Noir (96-points) is only $33.50. I believe it may be the best $33.50 American-made wine you can find. Even his Weber Pinot Noir (98-points), retails for just under $75.

‘Domaine Leflaive’s Bourgogne Blanc is better than most producers’ Puligny 1er crus,’ Maresh continues. ‘I don’t source any grapes for the Dundee Hills bottlings. It’s all Weber and Maresh Pinot Noir that doesn’t make it into the single-vineyard designate. So, the pedigree of this fruit is very high for a broader appellation bottling.

‘It’s also important to note that I give the Dundee Hills 14-20 months in barrel. In many cases, entry-level wines are bottled in August out of convenience or necessity in some cases.’

Willamette Valley 2022: top five Pinot Noir values:

Arterberry Maresh, Pinot Noir, Dundee Hills 96pts

Hundred Suns, Pinot Noir, Eola-Amity Hills 96pts

Evesham Wood, Cuvée, Eola-Amity Hills 95pts

Haden Fig, Freedom Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir, Mt Pisgah 95pts

Bethel Heights, Estate Pinot Noir, Eola-Amity Hills, 94pts

A commitment to place

No one may produce more under-$50 wines of such tremendous quality than Erin Nuccio, who operates and makes the wines for the historic Evesham Wood and his more recent brand, Haden Fig. For him, it’s all about making wines of place.

Nuccio makes delicious Pinot Noirs, with classic Willamette Valley character at prices as low as $26.

‘The short answer is that I strongly believe that great wine belongs on every table,’ says Nuccio, ‘and I take great pride in striving to do that.’

The longer answer is that Nuccio’s philosophy follows in the footsteps of Russ Rainey, who founded the Evesham Wood winery in 1986. Nuccio then took ownership of Evesham Wood from the Rainey family in 2010.

‘Russ and I both started on the retail side of the wine business, and we cut our teeth tasting hundreds of wines a month, looking for exceptional value from wines worldwide. When he started Evesham Wood, he keenly remembered his retail roots, focusing on producing wines he could afford to buy and drink regularly,’ says Nuccio.

‘When I decided to start my winery, Haden Fig, in 2007,’ he continues, ‘I too was driven by the potential the Willamette Valley had to produce amazing Pinot Noir with a real sense of place.’

See the Willamette Valley 2022 Top 100 score table

‘I get a real sense of fulfilment from producing our Willamette Valley bottlings. We produce those cuvées exactly like our top single vineyards – carefully selected vineyards farmed organically and without irrigation, hand-picked and carefully sorted.

‘The only real difference is the length of time in the barrel. Bottling the Willamette Valley blend right before harvest frees up essential space and barrels, which allows us to keep costs down.’

He concludes: ‘When we had the opportunity to expand our estate vineyards a few years ago, we did so with the deliberate intention of expanding our Willamette Valley bottling production.

‘We started our vineyard search not in the highly regarded and sought sub-AVAs but in the lesser-known pockets of the greater Willamette Valley, where we felt we could find great value and a great sense of place to expand our Willamette Valley bottling.’

Intentionality counts

’I’ve always believed that if you are going to put your name on the label, then the wine is good, full stop,’ says second-generation winemaker Ben Casteel of Bethel Heights. ‘We work on blending our Estate Pinot Noir first to ensure it isn’t simply what is left in the cellar when the other wines are finished but a deliberate wine that speaks to our vineyard, the growing season, and the cellaring that followed.’

‘I grow grapes and make wine for a living, but I’m also a consumer, and I find myself drawn to producers not based on their higher price point, vineyard or block-specific wines, but by the entry-level wine they are putting their name on. When it is evident the attention to detail isn’t reserved for a handful of wines but the entire lineup, that resonates with me.’

The Willamette Valley’s Pinot Noirs should resonate with wine lovers looking for a great deal in a variety that has long been considered too expensive to provide true value. These wines will undoubtedly challenge that perception and make the case for wines of place still being affordable enough to have on every table.

Willamette Valley 2022: a lucky selection of 13 Pinot Noir values

Related articles

Oregon vintage report: Tricky Willamette Valley 2022 sticks the landing

Chardonnay from Oregon’s Dundee Hills

USA Chardonnay: Panel tasting results

 ‘While the 2021 vintage Chardonnays showed an immediacy of brilliant character, the elegance and precision imbued in these white wines from the long, cool, and at times, tumultuous 2022 vintage should prove to be even better over time.’

The difficulties that beset the early part of the 2022 growing season had the most significant impact on Chardonnay in the Willamette Valley.

A significant freeze event occurred early on the morning of 15 April, and owing to its ripening early, the Chardonnay buds were further along and bore the brunt of the damage. The early prognostications were grim. However, things were nowhere near as dire as they were initially reported – anywhere from 50% to a total loss for the vintage.

Perhaps winemaker Kate Payne Brown put it best.

‘Chardonnay from the 2022 vintage tells a story of unexpected resilience,’ she says.

Scroll down for top-scoring Willamette Valley Chardonnays of the 2022 vintage

‘In late April, an unseasonably late frost and snowstorm hit the Dundee Hills, affecting many Chardonnay vines that had already gone through bud break. I vividly recall walking through our lower Chardonnay blocks right after the frost, where there were singed leaves and some of the buds resembled overcooked asparagus.

‘It was emotional, unlike anything I’d experienced before in the Valley. At that point, I was uncertain about what the harvest would yield.’

The great rebound

She continues: ‘My friends in Burgundy predicted that we’d only see 10-20% of our usual yields from secondary and tertiary buds but maintained that the following year would be more fruitful. I braced myself for very light yields and potentially unbalanced fruit.

‘To our surprise, the vines rebounded with much more fruit than anticipated; in fact, the clusters were big. The season shifted by about a month as the vines recovered from the frost, leading us to pick Chardonnay roughly 2.5 weeks later than usual.’

For me, the Chardonnays of the Willamette Valley continue to be, perhaps, among the most under-appreciated gems in wine; certainly among American wines.

While the 2021 vintage Chardonnays showed an immediacy of brilliant character, the elegance imbued in these white wines from the long, cool, and, at times, tumultuous vintage should prove to be even better over time.

These Chardonnays have such beautiful acids. Combined with the textures that the vintage’s thicker skins have augmented, they are real classics that Chardonnay fans from Oregon and beyond will relish.

A collector’s vintage as well, as these wines are sure to age beautifully, despite already offering a very rich drinking experience.

As the grape continues to show such a natural affinity for the Willamette Valley’s growing conditions and the volcanic soils present throughout the valley, and particularly in the Eola-Amity Hills, it may very well become the country’s go-to region for the variety.

2022 in the Willamette Valley: 5/5

A cool and wet spring, including an early April frost, made winemakers nervous that there would be adequate heat to reach phenolic ripeness. A warmer-than-average and, more importantly, completely dry October was just what the doctor ordered for Willamette Valley’s growers and winemakers.

The resulting wines show great freshness and structure at lower alcohols, with acidity that hints at outstanding ageability.

See all 280+ Willamette Valley 2022 tasting notes and scores

Defying expectations

‘The Chardonnay from the 2022 vintage really exceeded my expectations,’ says Daniel Estrin, winemaker at Cristom Estate.

‘The cool weather helped us retain acid in spades,’ he continues. ‘Being able to nail the pick is the most important decision we make in the winemaking process. The slow ascension of brix combined with the retention of acid allowed us to get the grapes off at the intersection of ripeness and freshness.

‘Once in the winery, we do everything we can to retain the potential of the grapes at the time of harvest.’

Jackson Holstein, winemaker and proprietor at Granville, adds: ‘The 2022 vintage yielded some of the most compact, textured, yet precise and age-worthy Chardonnays this valley has seen. That duality doesn’t always exist.

‘While that early April frost delayed many vines, most rebounded in a heroic manner,’ he continues.

‘The fall weather brought little relief from the heat, nor did it provide any moisture to replenish the vines. As a result, skins were thicker than usual, while mildly ripe flavours consolidated with relatively high acids (tartaric, specifically). It was somewhat of a perfect vigneron soup of flavours and freshness.’

‘If 2021 was a hot vintage masquerading as a cool one, 2022 is very much the opposite: a cool growing season that ended not just warm but hot,’ says Bethel Heights winemaker Ben Casteel. ‘The distinction is especially important for Chardonnay, where the difference between wines of tension versus wines of opulence can be decided in a couple of days.’

‘At Bethel Heights, in 2021, we were able to wait on Chardonnay as late September and early October were cool, allowing for flavour development without losing acidity or rapid sugar accumulation,’ Casteel continues.

‘In 2022, everything was compressed, given the late-season heat, so we were scrambling to pick grapes that would make wines of balance and grace. I feel great about our wines from 2022 as a testament to our vineyard and our production team. Still, one of the defining elements of 2022 is that while we needed the late-season heat for Pinot Noir, the window for taut, energetic, world-class Chardonnay was a narrow one indeed.’

See the Willamette Valley 2022 Top 100 score table

Willamette Valley 2022: top 10 Chardonnays of the vintage:

Reviews in the link

Walter Scott, X Novo Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 98pts

Ambar Estate, Lustral Chardonnay, Dundee Hills 97pts

Arterberry Maresh, Chardonnay, Dundee Hills 97pts

Composition, Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 97pts

Cristom, Louise Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 97pts

Evening Land, Summum Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 97pts

Nicolas-Jay, Bishop Creek Chardonnay, Yamhill Carlton 97pts

Bergström, Sigrid, Willamette Valley 96pts

Granville, Koosah Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 96pts

Hundred Suns, Marianas Chardonnay, Willamette Valley 96pts

Willamette Valley 2022 Chardonnay: a selection of 20 wines

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Chardonnay from Oregon’s Dundee Hills

USA Chardonnay: Panel tasting results

TOP WINES

Our North America Regional Editor, Clive Pursehouse, has assessed the 2022 vintage in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

Here we present a quick and easy way to see tasting notes and scores for his top 100 Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays.

Wines are listed in score order.

 ‘The 2022 Chardonnays are imbued with great elegance, and the Pinot Noirs show an outstanding confidence across the Valley’s appellations. The cool and prolonged growing season has helped create wines with tremendous freshness that are balanced with ample concentration.’

The 2022 growing season got off to a shaky start but ended brilliantly in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

The season began with an ill-timed frost in the early morning hours of 15 April. The spring freeze caused significant damage to primary buds.

As an early-ripening variety, Chardonnay was the most impacted, particularly in parts of the northern Willamette Valley, like the Dundee Hills and Yamhill-Carlton, where bud break was already further along.

There was plenty of handwringing up and down the Willamette in the immediate aftermath of the spring frost. Nonetheless, many growers reported yields similar to those of an average growing season come harvest time.

There would be a few more twists and turns before the season was through, but – it stuck the landing.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of the top Willamette Valley 2022 Pinot Noir and Chardonnay

‘I never want to diminish the challenges of a vintage,‘ says Bethel Heights winemaker Ben Casteel, ‘as we are all affected differently; the valley is 3.5 million acres [1.4m hectares], after all.

‘But we hadn’t had a significant frost event in the Willamette Valley since 1985, a distant memory for the most seasoned growers. Yet, some were speaking with the countenance of authority that half of the crop was gone in April.’

In the end, larger clusters and resilient secondary buds, as well as perhaps some premature doom and gloom, made for an outstanding vintage despite the early difficulties.

2022 Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs of the vintage

Arterberry Maresh, Weber Vineyard Pinot Noir, Dundee Hills 98pts

Hundred Suns, Own-Rooted Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley 98pts

2022 Willamette Valley Chardonnay of the vintage

Walter Scott, X Novo Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills 98pts

See all 280+ Willamette Valley 2022 tasting notes and scores

A waiting game ensues

Despite three extraordinarily warm days, June 2022 was an extremely cool month overall in the Willamette Valley. The high daytime temperatures did not reliably rise above the 60s (over 20°C) until 21 June.This proved vexing for winemakers.

‘It was the vintage that almost didn’t happen,’ says Evan Martin of Martin Woods. ‘We just barely got there before it was raining cats and dogs on 22 October. We had the coldest May on record and a classic Pacific-Northwest “June-uary”. The moderate summer that followed meant we weren’t making it up.’

Cristom’s winemaker, Daniel Estrin, remarks: ‘As we came into September, we were still going through veraison in much of the Cristom Estate. While many of Oregon’s typical harvests have rain during the last push, I was really concerned that we were going to get a significant rain event while we were still at low brix.

‘This would mean we would try to hang it to get some more ripeness, which would likely end with significant rot.’

‘Additionally,’ Estrin continues, ‘going through veraison late and then picking a short time later due to the warmth could lead to unripe tannins, particularly stem tannin, which we rely on so heavily. Luckily, this premonition did not come true, and we had a beautiful warm September followed by a dry October until late in the month.’

Good fortune, and perhaps Mother Nature’s penchant for Oregon Pinot Noir, meant that dreadfully cold May was bookended by a glorious October.

Martin concludes: ‘By the first of October, we weren’t even to sparkling numbers. If it had been a typical Oregon October, we wouldn’t have picked the grapes, to be honest with you.’

See the top 100 Pinot Noir and Chardonnays from the 2022 vintage

Willamette Valley vintage ratings

2022 5/5

A cool and wet spring, including an early April frost, made winemakers nervous that there would be adequate warmth to reach phenolic ripeness. A warmer-than-average and, more importantly, completely dry October was just what the doctor ordered for Willamette Valley’s growers and winemakers. The resulting wines show great freshness and structure at lower alcohols, with acidity that hints at outstanding ageability.

2021 4/5

After a challenging 2020, growers and winemakers were rewarded with a vintage of outstanding quality, albeit with slightly lower yields. Up and down the Willamette Valley and across different grape varieties, wines show ample ripeness and freshness, and there is plenty of elegance from top producers.

2020 2/5

A picture-perfect vintage was all but destroyed by wildfire smoke from the high pressure and wind event around the Labor Day weekend (5-6 September). Many wineries did not even produce red wine in 2020; those that did saw varied impacts from smoke taint. There were some well-made white wines, Chardonnay in particular.

2019 5/5

While yields were lower, 2019 was a throwback to the classically cool and elegant vintages that made the Willamette Valley’s Pinot Noirs famous. For the first time in recent memory, temperatures were lower than the year prior, and there were late rains. For long-standing winemakers, it was a return to the good old days.

A perfect finish

As the saying goes, it’s not how you start that’s important, but where you finish. The 2022 vintage in the Willamette Valley had a finish that was simply perfect.

‘In all, it was a cool year with the warmest October I can remember,’ says Jimmy Maresh, second-generation winemaker at Arterberry-Maresh. ‘It was like paradise in Oregon, with 75° days (24°C) and blue skies.’

Ultimately, that finish made for a beautiful vintage. For many in the valley, the long, cool start to summer was reminiscent of an earlier time. There was some pest pressure and concern about birds.

Still, by October, generally healthy crop loads, particularly for Pinot Noir, made the cold complications of an April frost and chilly May seem like distant memories.

The 2022 Chardonnays are imbued with great elegance, and the Pinot Noirs show outstanding confidence across the Valley’s appellations. The cool and prolonged growing season has helped create wines with tremendous freshness that are balanced with ample concentration. A five-star vintage for the Willamette Valley.

‘This is a vintage that definitely has more tension,’ says Jean-Nicolas Méo of Nicolas-Jay.

‘While I wouldn’t call the previous year (2021) a super-warm vintage, it came across as sturdier or more ripe. 2022, on the other hand, shows a more natural balance with its acids and is more ethereal and lighter-weight.

‘It’s a brilliant combination of ripeness and tension. It’s a dynamic vintage in Oregon, and the wines will improve over the next few years.’

Willamette Valley 2022: a selection from our top-scoring wines

The following wines scored 95 points or above and are listed white then red in score order.

Related articles

• Composition: A Willamette Valley project from DRC’s Bertrand de Villaine and Katrina Rank
• Chardonnay from Oregon’s Dundee Hills
• Oregon Chardonnay: top producers to know and wines to try

‘It all started in a class I was taking in Burgundy in 2016,’ says winemaker Katrina Rank about her winemaking partnership with de Villaine: Composition.

On that day in Burgundy, Rank had asked Bertrand de Villaine if he’d ever considered making wine from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, a proven sweet spot for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

As it turned out, de Villaine, part of the family that owns and runs the most famous domaine in Burgundy – Domaine de la Romanée-Conti – had first fallen in love with wine not in Burgundy as one might expect, but in Willamette.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of the Composition 2022 vintage

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de Villaine and Rank in the Composition barrel room. Credit: Composition

A French icon’s Oregon roots

In 1995, a young Bertrand de Villaine was a college business student who accepted a one-semester exchange programme at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.

‘In fact, I had the chance to meet many people in Oregon when I was there as a student in the mid-nineties,’ de Villaine recalls. ‘These were some of the winemakers who are now recognised for the quality of what they have helped establish.’

‘People like David Adelsheim,’ he continues. ‘These people started working there in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It was not long after Drouhin had started producing wine there when I arrived.’

‘I’m not a prophet,’ de Villaine explains, ‘but I just saw these people doing so much at such a pivotal time for that region. These were really the founders who were doing the difficult work. Work which was done here in Burgundy thousands of years ago.’

‘Of course, this was my first wine training, to be honest, because, at that time, I was not even thinking of being part of the wine industry,’ de Villaine admits.

His experience with David Adelsheim as a young student in the Willamette Valley was pivotal. ‘I always say that it was the place that planted the seed, the idea of wine in me. It’s sincere because I didn’t have any connection with wine at that moment except meeting some winemakers in Oregon.’

The headstrong American

Katrina Rank came to Napa Valley in 1999 and studied art before eventually transitioning to an oenology and wine curriculum. Rank started making wines in the Chalone AVA in Monterey, California, which had been founded by winemaker Dick Graff in the 1960s .

Graff’s Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays showed the way forward for fine Burgundian varieties in California. When Rank’s winemaking career began in earnest, the persistent state of drought in California was casting that promise into doubt.

Rank began to cast her eyes northwards to other cool climate regions where she could get the results she wanted.

‘By the time I started making wine there [in California], the drought was almost in its fifth or sixth year. And so, I already had eyes on Oregon and moving the operation,’ Rank says.

Meeting in Burgundy

The meeting of Rank and de Villaine was pure serendipity. As it happened, de Villaine – like many Burgundians before him – had already begun to ponder the possibility of an Oregon project when Rank popped up with her suggestion.

‘There was the seed of an idea that had been around for a long time, but meeting Katrina was the catalyst for an Oregon project to become a reality,’ says de Villaine.

‘The happenstance of Bertrand mentioning that he and his wife were considering doing something in the Willamette Valley was undeniable,’ Rank says. ‘It was something where they were scratching at the surface, not necessarily realising the possibility of actually making it happen. I said, look, “it’s all right there”.’

‘We met up a couple of months later in Oregon in 2016,’ Rank reveals. ‘Before we met, I had spent a good amount of time on our sourcing and researching vineyards because that was a focus of what we would be doing. And so that by the time Bertrand arrived, I had already brought it down to about three after going through about 15 vineyards.’

Composing the wines

There was a cultural push and pull to the project. ‘It was my American, “let’s make it happen”,’ says Rank, ‘to Bertrand’s, “let’s slow down a little bit, Katrina. It’s not a race”.’

‘I wanted to see it all,’ says Rank, ‘I wanted to look from top to bottom, and Oregon has so much growth potential. Initially, we sourced from one vineyard for our Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. That was Winter’s Hill, which Bertrand felt very comfortable with, given the Drouhin family’s relationship with that site.’

‘Since the 2021 vintage,’ Rank continued, ‘we source from two other vineyards, and we’re delighted with how the wines have turned out.’

The Chardonnay comes from a single vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills, older dry-farmed and biodynamic vines. The Pinot Noir comes from one of Oregon’s legacy sites in the Chehalem Mountain appellation, which is confusingly named Chehalem Mountain Vineyard.

Dick Erath planted it during the founding of the Willamette Valley, and it remains planted on its own-roots and biodynamically farmed.

Despite the distance, the language barriers and the odd philosophical difference, the foundations are universally agreed upon when it comes to making great wine.

‘We try to do what we both understand,’ de Villaine says. ‘The combination of soils and weather, the terroir; this is really the framework that we must work within.’

Rank was heavily involved in the winemaking when the brand launched in 2016, but the baton has been passed to Thomas Savre of Lingua Franca, who has the duo’s complete confidence.

The wines themselves are wonderfully composed. Elegance and site come to the fore in two wines, each expressing some of the Willamette Valley’s best-matched sites for their respective varieties.

The stellar 2022 wines from Composition

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The wineries’ lawsuit alleged that PacifiCorp’s refusal to cut off power to lines in a severe windstorm contributed to the fires that had deleterious effects on the 2020 vintage.

Wildfire smoke can damage wine by tainting the grapes; a phenomenon known as ‘smoke taint.’ It is particularly problematic with red wines in the maceration process.

As a result of the fires and intense and lingering wildfire smoke, many Willamette Valley wineries sold off wine in bulk, declassified wines, made white Pinot Noirs and, in the worst cases, made no wine at all.

Adam Campbell, second-generation owner and winemaker at Elk Cove Vineyards, said, ‘My gut tells me that the total production was probably cut in half across the valley.’

Campbell added, ‘At the time, we were mostly focused on how we honour our contracts with growers, get the grapes in and try and make something salvageable.

‘Subsequent to managing all of that, we learned that there were things that could have been done to mitigate some of the fires that PacifiCorp chose not to do. This lawsuit is about holding people accountable.’

However, the facts of the case would ultimately have to be decided upon by a jury.

PacifiCorp hasn’t directly commented on the case, although it told Associated Press that it was committed to settling all reasonable claims ‘as provided under Oregon law’.

Thus far, PacifiCorp has made several settlements regarding the wildfires. Earlier this week, the company’s Pacific Power business said it had reached a $178m settlement with 403 plaintiffs, in which the vast majority of plaintiffs opted out of class action litigation.

‘The company has settled nearly 1,500 Labor Day 2020 wildfire claims with individuals and businesses in California and Oregon and will continue to settle all reasonable claims,’ the group said.

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Dustin Dow, one of the attorneys representing several Willamette Valley wineries and vineyards that have smoke damage claims against PacifiCorp arising from the Labor Day 2020 fires, told Decanter: ‘Our clients are bringing these claims because PacifiCorp’s actions caused at least seven fires throughout Oregon on 7 and 8 September, 2020. These fires were a substantial factor in damaging our clients’ grapes and wine with smoke taint.’

It’s understood from Dow’s comments that a key issue regarding the complaint is the extent to which fires may have been caused or exacerbated by PacifiCorp leaving power lines energised.

Elk Cove’s Campbell said winemakers tried to make the best of a very difficult situation, but still saw a big impact from the wildfires.

‘We felt like we made some good decisions to mitigate some of the problems,’ he said. ‘In reality, in the best cases, our yields were cut in half. I know we made good wine; we wouldn’t have released it if we hadn’t.’

Campbell added, ‘We followed the research out of Australia about reducing press fractions, making more rosé, and pressing lighter. All of that impacted the amount of wine we were able to make.

‘We sold off wine as a lot of bulk wine and, in some cases, didn’t make wine from the most affected vineyards. Less extraction, lighter pressing – we tried it all. We even used milk products for fining; we did things we would never do. We salvaged what we could, but there was a lot of loss. We didn’t make reserve or single vineyard wines that vintage, which was a blow financially.’

Of the lawsuit, Campbell said, ‘Our goal here is to hold people to account. We’re not interested in jumping the line in front of people who lost their homes or entire timberland that was devastated. We’re aware that we lost half of one vintage and that some people lost everything.’

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The nearby Pacific Coast offers maritime influence that makes the Willamette Valley the growing region that it is. These conditions and the cool autumn weather, which is so well suited for Pinot Noir, make it a brilliant match for Riesling. Cool climate varieties, while not always mentioned in the same breath – as in the case of Pinot Noir and Riesling – tend to grow well together.

I believe that the top Rieslings from Oregon’s Willamette Valley are the very best of the variety on the West Coast. And that they are every bit as good as those found in New York’s Finger Lakes. While Riesling in the Willamette Valley might struggle for attention owing to the success of Pinot and the rising popularity of Oregon’s Chardonnay, it deserves to be part of the conversation about the top varieties in the Willamette Valley.

Cool to be cool climate

The best examples of Riesling from the Willamette Valley are not made in a lean, bone-dry style but rather lean into the variety’s complexities. The oldest vines, in particular, produce wines of incredible depth. Spice, floral fragrances and fruit complexity are the hallmarks of the Rieslings made at Brooks and Trisaetum, Riesling stalwarts of the Willamette Valley. Each makes multiple single-vineyard expressions that reflect a real commitment to the variety.

‘We have a greater diversity of Riesling in our cellar than any other variety,’ says Brooks head winemaker Claire Jarreau. ‘It’s by design, with 16 vineyards now representing almost every sub-AVA of the Willamette Valley. The Rieslings in our cellar express wildly differently throughout the valley but share common themes related to soil types, vine age and farming practices.’

‘Though we love creating stand-alone wines that decidedly show a sense of place, we also enjoy assembling harmonious blends that offer a broad perspective of the Willamette Valley through Riesling. These wines lead with layered and expressive fruit, high tension on the palate, and ample acidity that speak to our cool, windy, and at times marginal climate for growing Riesling.’

Among Oregon’s next wave, including names like Authentique and Martin Woods, winemakers are showing a renewed appreciation for Riesling, treating it with the same deference that they do Pinot Noir.

‘There are a lot of similarities in the growing conditions between Burgundy and Alsace,’ explains the French-born Hyland Estates winemaker Anne Sery. They share a couple of varieties: Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, and Pinot Gris. So I don’t think it’s a leap at all to have Oregon growing top-quality Riesling.’

‘Riesling is a very late-ripening variety,’ Sery continues. ‘The fall weather in Oregon tends to be nice and dry. A lot of the Riesling planted here is grown on sites that tend to be cooler because of their elevation or exposure to wind.’

While Eyrie founder David Lett did not include Riesling in his original plantings when he broke ground in the region, many of those who followed in his footsteps did. This has resulted in some of the valley’s oldest vines being Riesling – most notably those at the McMinnville AVA site, Hyland Vineyard.

‘When Hyland was planted, they tested everything,’ Sery says, ‘including things like Syrah and Merlot. What remains is what ended up growing well; we have Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling and Gewürztraminer.’

‘What makes the Hyland Riesling special is that it is still own-rooted, and the vines are very healthy. The vines are 50 years old and don’t need much management, to be honest. Their yield is self-moderated, and we always get amazing acidity for the perfect level of sugar and flavour ripeness. It has been one of our flagship wines, along with the Pinot Noir, from the Coury clone since we started the brand in 2009, and it has been one of our main areas of focus.’

Special soils

In addition to the climate, winemaker Mark Vlossak believes soils make all the difference, particularly those where his Riesling is planted in the Eola-Amity Hills renowned vineyard Temperance Hill.

Vlossak founded St. Innocent Winery in the late 1980s. Some good fortune in the vineyard and an upbringing filled with wonderful German Rieslings led to his wholly unique Willamette Valley bottling, made in a Kabinett halbtrocken style.

His Riesling block at Temperance Hill sits at the very top, perhaps the highest in all of the Eola-Amity appellation. It’s a bit of an anomaly given the sub-region’s incredible reputation for Pinot Noir and, more and more, Chardonnay. ‘I had taken the block over from Rob Stuart, who was making sparkling wine for his Big Fire label. They were own-rooted Pinot Noir vines and eventually died from phylloxera.’

‘When I told Dai Crisp (the Temperance Hill vineyard manager) that I wanted to replant the block to Riesling, he looked at me like I had two heads,’ Vlossak recalls. Crisp was concerned that Vlossak would pick the fruit too late but relented when he told him he aimed to create a Kabinett-style Riesling.

‘I used two different clones, and I couldn’t get them all at once, so the block was planted over two years, and now it’s on its eighth or ninth leaf (fifth or sixth harvest), says Vlossak. ‘The soils were so poor and shallow that we lost a bunch of the vines, initially, but it had this blue silicate material in the rock, and that made me think of the blue slate soils in the Mosel.

‘I honestly can’t believe the wine is as good as it is,’ Vlossak continues. ‘I didn’t think I’d be able to make a Riesling like this for 20 years. It’s got diesel notes and classic secondary characteristics. There is so much complexity, and it’s only 10.5% alcohol. It’s honestly better than I imagined it would be.’

Claire Jarreau agrees that the Willamette Valley’s soils are special for Riesling. ‘With the diversity of soil types in the Willamette Valley – volcanic basalts, marine sediments and glacial deposits – we feel both the pleasure and responsibility to showcase the distinctiveness of our region through single-vineyard wines. This is true for us with both Pinot Noir and Riesling.’

A selection of 10 Oregon Rieslings

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Before creation, the void. Naught as a concept is a somewhat recent creation, thought to date to fifth-century India. However, it was not introduced to Europe until the twelfth century when the Italian mathematician Fibonacci explained his ‘Modus Indorum’.

To Chris and Kathryn Hermann, the founders of 00 Wines, the number symbolizes ‘potential’. The Hermanns are great believers in the potential of the Willamette Valley. Still, their vision extends far beyond local boundaries. The quest that truly motivates 00 Wines is to produce Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the world’s greatest cool-climate sites.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for 18 wines from 00 Wines

Founder Chris Hermann is neither a grape grower nor a winemaker by training. Yet his connection to winemaking runs deep. His father was a professor of botany at Oregon State University. Originally from Germany, the family emigrated in the 1950s and raised their children with a love of food and wine. European wines were served at the Hermann home since no wine was being made in Oregon. Chris grew up exposed to top-quality Riesling and Burgundy. Law studies followed, and Hermann specialized in the burgeoning beverage alcohol industry.

He mainly worked with wineries in California and Oregon, counting Dominique Lafon, Veronique Drouhin, Jean-Nicolas Méo, and countless other Oregon pioneers as friends and clients. Hermann commented, ‘I had plenty of time to see the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of the wine business.’

Oregonian from the outset

Despite exposure to the occasional cautionary tale, Chris Hermann nurtured a dream to establish a winery with his father. He credits Lafon with particular inspiration. When asked, ‘Why are you here (in Oregon)? You make some of the greatest wines in Burgundy,’ Lafon replied. ‘Because the potential here is enormous. There are things here that are completely unexplored.’

Hermann and his father set off to explore them. They began to visit Burgundy often and were mentored by Dominique Lafon, Raphaël Coche, and particularly by Jean-Marc Roulot, who was very forthcoming with the technical arcana of press cycles and turbidity levels. The Hermanns hired oenologist Pierre Millemann, who had consulted for the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and many other Domaines in his bustling consulting practice.

The winemaker for the first vintage of 00 Wines was Léa Lafon, who returned to Burgundy after the vintage. She was replaced by Millemann protégé Alban Debeaulieu (currently the winemaker at Abbott Claim). The Oregon wines are currently made at the custom-crush facility of the Carlton Winemakers Studio. Crafted by winemaker Matt Perry with consulting winemaker Felipe Ramirez, who was the former technical director for the Chapter 24 project of Louis-Michel Liger-Belair.

‘Our wines are consistent across winemakers because of the protocols we’ve developed,’ says Chris Hermann. ‘They don’t do their own thing. These protocols are the driver for our 00 style.’

‘For example,’ Hermann continues. ‘When we bring in the fruit, we do a very specific foot crush in the picking bins. Then, I go back personally through each bin. It takes me hours, but I check the berries that were crushed to ensure that the quality and character of the juice will produce the aromatics, flavours and textures that are the hallmark of our wines.’

French roots realised

In 2016, 00 Wines began to produce champagne in consultation with Julien Launois of Champagne Paul Launois. They use grapes exclusively from Le Mesnil-sur-Oger. The fermentation of the base wines is done in casks. In addition to nonvintage champagne blended with reserve wines from Launois, the team has fermented a ‘single barrel’ champagne produced using casks from the Tonnellerie de Champagne and local oak from the Ardennes Forest.

‘We started the project with the focus on exploring the potential of Chardonnay in Oregon; we wanted to see what happens when you use Burgundian methods here,’ says Hermann. ‘It made sense then that we’d want to go to Chardonnay’s motherland. The three greatest Chardonnay regions in the world are the Côte-d’Or Côte des Blancs and the Willamette Valley. We’ve been focused on sourcing from the greatest vineyards in the best terroirs in the world. It’s all about Chardonnay for us.’

In 2017, Millemann helped the team to produce a Corton Charlemagne sourced from grapes from the Le Corton lieu-dit at the top of the slope. Today the range of Burgundy has expanded, and in 2022, the team produced Chambertin, Charmes-Chambertin (from the lieu-dit Aux Charmes), and Corton Charlemagne (now blended from grapes in En Charlemagne and Les Languettes as well as Le Corton), and the premier crus Meursault Charmes, Pommard Clos des Epenots, and Beane Cent Vignes.

Although Millemann has left the project to focus on his own label, he has installed his student Max Lecat as the full-time winemaker in France, who makes the wines at Dominique Lafon’s facility at the Château de Bligny.

‘Max was our winemaker here in Oregon, and he returned to Burgundy. It made sense that he’d make our wines over there,’ says Chris Hermann. ‘It’s exciting to us from a consistency point of view. It makes everything a little bit easier.’

The methodology behind 00

There are several components to the methods developed by Millemann for white wine and implemented by the team at 00 Wines. It starts with picking at lower sugar levels than ordinary in Oregon to retain lots of fresh, natural acidity. The grapes are foot-crushed to develop the must’s phenolic content and slowly and firmly pressed (up to three hours at up to two bars of pressure).

As Hermann describes it, ‘tannin is the foundation of their Coche-style’. The must is not sulfured in the press but oxidizes and turns brown, only to fall bright again during fermentation, which improves the stability of the wine and avoids oxidation later. This technique is what Hermann calls the ‘black Chardonnay’ method. The wines are all aged in a cask. Sourced mainly from the Damy cooperage for at least twelve months and another six in the tank. The top 00 wines are treated to a full two years in a cask before bottling in a combination of lightly toasted 228-litre and 500-litre casks, both new and used.

The Pinot Noir is also produced according to a rigorous method. Each of the grapes is individually snipped from the bunch with scissors, and the unbroken grapes are sealed in 500-litre clay amphorae from Italy for a week to undergo semi-carbonic maceration. Dry ice is used to exclude oxygen at this point. After a week’s maceration, the amphorae are unsealed, the grapes are lightly crushed, and the fermentation continues until the wine is dry when it is pressed and run into top-quality Damy barrels.

According to Chris Hermann, the secret of the texture is in the selection of the clay for the amphorae. He believes that a relatively porous clay allows just the right amount of oxygen into the system to soften the tannins and give the wines the silken texture he desires.

Staying small

To produce wines with this level of attention to detail, the scale of the operation has necessarily remained small. Hermann notes, ‘For most people, wine production is a massive real estate business; we have opted for an ‘asset-lite’ method, where we buy the best grapes, hire the best winemakers, and buy the best barrels. We don’t have much wine and are not in the “wine entertainment” business.’

Last year, the winery produced 54,000 bottles, and the aim is to grow this to a total of 60,000 bottles from Oregon and 6,000 bottles each in Burgundy and Champagne. The distribution is also bespoke, relying on their mailing list and a limited number of points of sale, including Rare Wine Company in the U.S., Corney & Barrow in the U.K., and Grand Cru Wine Concierge throughout Asia.

Vineyards

00 Wines also works with a carefully selected range of vineyard sources. According to Hermann, they look for sites that can deliver minerality and tension, the characters that he found in the wines of his youth but are sometimes lacking in Oregon. His wide range of contacts in Oregon has allowed him access to an array of interesting sites, and his expertise lies in choosing the most expressive for his production.

‘We think Seven Springs is the greatest Chardonnay vineyard in Oregon, so we are thrilled to be getting so much fruit from there,’ says Chris Hermann.

‘The Chehalem Mountains Vineyard, though, is very special, and we want to make sure it’s celebrated,’ Kathryn Hermann adds. ‘The vines were originally planted by Dick Erath in 1968 (his original vineyard), and it’s now owned by the Gross family, who are in the process of converting it to biodynamic. Sometimes, this vineyard gets left out of the conversation when it comes to the best sites in the Willamette. The naming conventions with the AVA and the site itself compound some of that confusion.’

‘The Chehalem site gives us Wente Clone and sedimentary soils,’ says Chris Hermann. ‘It goes into our EGW every year; the Kathryn Hermann Cuvée is made from it. It is an important site to us. Seven Springs, on the other hand, has volcanic soils and the Dijon-96 Chardonnay clone. These two vineyards allow us to showcase the difference between two distinct Willamette Valley terroirs. Everything is at play here: elevation, soil types, and clone,’ says Chris Hermann.

00 Oregon Vineyard Sources

Seven Springs Vineyard: Some of the Chardonnay is sourced from the emblematic vineyard planted in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in the 1980s by the MacDonald family. Seven Springs was later developed as Evening Land Vineyards by Hollywood producer Mark Tarlov and his partners, who brought Dominique Lafon to Oregon in 2007, and is today overseen by Rajat Parr and Sashi Moorman. The grapes for 00 Wines come from the ‘H Block’ on the north side of the property that Dominique and Tarlov planted, with both Dijon clones from Burgundy and older Wente clones from U.C. Davis that are vinified together.

Richard Hermann Cuvée: The Richard Hermann Cuvée is from an unnamed site in the Eola-Amity hills AVA, where Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are planted in volcanic soils. This cool site delivers wines of great finesse, elegance, and freshness that balance out the powerful fruit sourced elsewhere.

Hyland Vineyard: Hermann sources some of his Pinot Noir from this vineyard, among the oldest vineyards in the Willamette Valley. It is located on south-facing slopes in the McMinnville AVA. 00 shares block 1D with Nicolas Jay (Jean-Nicolas Méo’s project), Antica Terra, and Penner-Ash. The grapes are from the mysterious heritage ‘Coury Clone’, planted here without grafting in Jory soils that deliver a taste rich in iron.

Chehalem Mountains Old Vine: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are sourced from a vineyard that David Lett (of Eyrie Vineyards) and Dick Erath planted in this AVA but did not farm themselves. It is among the oldest vineyards in the district, planted with own-rooted vines of the Coury clone Pinot Noir and Wente clone Chardonnay. However, instead of Jory soils, this is entirely marine sedimentary soils.

This combination of unique sites ranging throughout the Willamette Valley to the Côte d’Or and Champagne’s Côte des Blancs and the carefully calibrated winemaking techniques allows 00 Wines to deliver on their dream of offering a range of cool-climate expressions of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in a most distinctive style.

00 Wines to try: 18 bottles from France, Oregon and Burgundy

Wines are listed in score order by style

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When David Lett came to the Willamette Valley in the 1960s, he found cool, forested hills along the Willamette River. It was here in 1965, that he would plant some of the valley’s first vines. He would soon be joined by the Sokol Blossers and Dick Erath, who also planted vines on these foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range.

Just over 10 years later, a blind tasting in Paris, the 1979 Gault-Millau French Wine Olympiad, would change Oregon and American wine forever. Lett’s Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir from 1975 would be among the top wines tasted (of 330) from around the world.

These results, and the consistent quality of wines produced by Lett and his contemporaries, inspired Domaine Joseph Drouhin to eventually plant vineyards in the Dundee Hills in the late 1980s. Thus validating the ‘New World’ upstarts and their commitment to Oregon’s viticultural potential in the eyes of Burgundy.

These days Chardonnay is on the rise, with the Willamette Valley producing some of the best examples of the variety in the United States and beyond.

Special Soils

The Red Hills of Dundee is the official name of the hills as a geological entity, according to the US Geological Survey.

However, the Red Hills moniker can’t be used by the AVA or wineries because of the term being used in a Southern Oregon AVA: Red Hill Douglas County.

The rust-coloured hue of the soils in Dundee comes from the iron-rich basalt bedrock and its degradation, forming the soils of the Dundee Hills over aeons.

The origin of the Jory soils series, which can be found throughout western Oregon, came from ancient lava flows from the eastern part of the state 15-17 million years ago.

The origin of these red soils predates the Missoula Floods, which shaped so much of the Pacific Northwest’s geology.

The impact on winegrowing is owed to Jory soil being more acidic than alkaline and its ‘Goldilocks’ qualities when it comes to water drainage and temperature regulation.

Well-draining but with enough water retention that dry-farming is viable. The soil’s insulating properties keep the vines’ roots warm enough through the winter and cool them down in the hot summers in the Willamette Valley.

Dundee Hills at a glance

AVA Established: 2005

Original Vines: David Lett pioneered the Willamette Valley from the Dundee Hills planting vines on 22 February, 1965

Vineyards in the AVA:98

Wineries in the AVA: 28

Total hectares planted to vines: 900ha

Soils: The Dundee Hills is uniformly comprised of the Jory soil series. A red soil of degraded basalt

Key wine varieties: Pinot noir (69.5%), Chardonnay (5.75%), Pinot gris (2.23%)

Climatic conditions

The Dundee Hills range from 60-325m (200-1,067ft), a series of foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, which are buffeted by Pacific Ocean winds coming from the west.

The Columbia Gorge acts as a wind tunnel to the north of the Willamette Valley, funnelling hot air from eastern Oregon and Washington in the summer and cold air in the winter.

These winds are largely blocked by the Chehalem Mountains to the northeast of the Dundee Hills.

Keeping things steadier than many surrounding parts of the Willamette Valley.

These moderating factors include the Willamette River just to the east, which creates a cooling effect during the hot summer. As a result, vineyards in the Dundee Hills tend to have a more moderate, steady growing season.

Six Dundee Hills Chardonnay producers

Anderson Family Vineyards

Cliff and Allison Anderson own an 8ha (20 acre) parcel atop a steep, ancient basalt slide on the northeastern edges of the Dundee Hills.

Sitting at around 92 metres with some of the slopes in excess of 40% gradient. The 30-year-old vines of two Dijon clones, (76 and 96) on these steep slopes create wines of serious complexity. Most of their fruit is contracted to some of the Willamette Valley’s top growers (but they don’t let go of any of the 96 clone Chardonnay).

Chardonnay from their ‘South Block’ has gone to Bergstrom’s Sigrid and the Antica Terra Chardonnays.

They select specific parcels for their proprietary label and use strictly gravity, seriously old barrels (many over 15 years) and patience.

The ultra-small production Anderson Family wines fly under the radar except with those really in the know in the Willamette Valley.

‘An important part of our fermentation regime relates to the life cycle of yeasts,’ Cliff Anderson tells me. ‘With our slow ferments, the yeast goes through many iterations. The old cells autolysize, and new cells are born.

'As the old cell membranes break down, they release complexing elements into the wine, similar to a late-disgorged Champagne: toasty, brioche and hazelnut. The long exposure to yeast cells is a major component of a wine’s texture. Where it gains density and viscosity. We want our Chardonnays to have weight.’

Bergström

Swedish immigrant John Bergström came to the Portland area as a 17-year-old hailing from agricultural roots in a northern Sweden logging outpost.

He and his wife Karen Bergström both had successful medical careers and sought a family legacy that was a return to John’s farming roots. The Bergströms bought just over 5ha in the Dundee Hills in 1996.

Their son Josh, along with his parents, would go on to establish Bergström Wines upon his return from Beaune, where he completed his studies in viticulture and oenology.

The Bergström approach is based on biodynamic and regenerative farming in the vineyards and crafting vineyard and single-block bottlings that give their wines a real sense of place. ‘Singular fine wines should speak volumes in their regional expression,’ says winemaker Josh Bergström. ‘This is achieved, for us, through natural, healthy, and non-industrial practices.’

Cameron

Cameron Winery’s renowned vineyard is known as Clos Electrique, a nearly 1ha site of mostly own-rooted Pinot Noir, which was planted in 1984 and Chardonnay, which owner John Paul planted in 1987.

Paul developed a relationship with Chardonnay after meeting Dominique Lafon in Napa Valley in 1980 (where Paul was the assistant winemaker at Carneros Creek). ‘When I went to visit the cellars of Lafon the next year, Dominique pretty much blew my mind with the wines that I tried. Several years later, I was able to visit the cellar of François Jobard, and my deal with Chardonnay was sealed.’

‘I had, with the help of Mary Edwards (then at Matanzas Creek), collected a large number of old white Burgundy clones around California,’ Paul continues. ‘Ones that UC Davis had not destroyed, as well as some “suitcase clones” bestowed on me by notable growers in California. One of the defining attributes of these old clones, besides miserable cluster sizes and yields, is their high acidities at ripeness.’

‘This gears them to the methodology of Jobard and Lafon,’ Paul continued. ‘Which is allowing the ambient yeast from the vineyard to do the fermentations and then leaving the wines on the yeast for almost two full years. In the case of Jobard, leaving them completely untouched. Which is the method that I follow. At bottling, we select the most outstanding barrels from the lot for inclusion into the Clos Electrique designation.’

Domaine Drouhin

Robert Drouhin’s daughter Véronique arrived in Oregon in 1986, perhaps chasing her father’s obsession with that 1975 Eyrie South Block Reserve Pinot Noir. Which had placed in the top 10 in the 1979 Gault-Millau French Wine Olympiad. Robert recreated the tasting the following year at his home using several of his own wines. The pesky Oregon Pinot placed second, beaten only by one of Drouhin’s own 1959 bottlings.

Véronique would work the harvest in 1986 with three of the most important families in the Willamette Valley today. The Letts of Eyrie of course, the Casteels of the Eola-Amity Hills Bethel Heights estate and the Adelsheims.

Just prior to arriving at the first International Pinot Noir Celebration in 1987, Robert purchased a plot of land atop the Dundee Hills. Among the 53ha of vines, there are only five or so of Chardonnay. Véronique remains the winemaker, and her brother Phillipe Drouhin manages the Oregon estate vineyards.

Domaine Serene

The Evenstad family came to the Willamette Valley in the late 1980s, purchasing a 17ha piece of high-elevation property in the Dundee Hills. They would plant Pinot Noir vines in 1993 at the estate Mark Bradford vineyard, at an elevation of 200m. In 1997, the Côte Sud Vineyard was purchased; the site, planted in 1990, gave Domaine Serene its oldest vines and first Chardonnay. This would also be the first vintage of Chardonnay made by Domaine Serene.

Eyrie Vineyards

Eyrie Vineyards is the legacy brand for the Dundee Hills, the Willamette Valley and really all of the Pacific Northwest. David Lett’s pursuit of cool-climate varieties like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that stand toe-to-toe with Old World expressions launched an entire region. The legacy has since been passed onto his son Jason. Their old-vine Chardonnay comes from the oldest vines in the Willamette Valley a Draper selection field blend on their own roots. A collection of vines that no longer really exist anywhere else.

In many ways, the wines of Eyrie Vineyards are historic in their own right; these bottles represent the beginning of it all.

Jason makes two Chardonnays – both are barrel selections. The ‘top wine’, The Eyrie, is chosen from barrels which show the greatest potential for ageability. At the same time, the Estate Chardonnay is a selection of barrels that may show a more immediate drinkability. The Chardonnay ferments one year in the cellar on its own yeasts. Since each barrel moves at its own pace, on its own lees, they can show up very distinct from one another after fermentation.

Oregon Chardonnay from the Dundee Hills:

Wines are listed alphabetically by producer in score order

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Dick and Nancy Ponzi came to the Willamette Valley in 1968, launching Ponzi Vineyards from a valley-floor estate vineyard in 1970. Relocating from Los Gatos, California, first-generation Italian-American Dick Ponzi was a mechanical engineer who designed rides for Disneyland.

Leaving the corporate life behind, Dick and Nancy’s interest in the wines of Burgundy brought them and their three young children to Oregon. At the time, David Lett had planted Pinot Noir, but the Ponzis did not know the Letts, and it would be years before they’d meet.

Scroll down to see tasting notes of seven Ponzi Vineyards wines

Four hectares of former strawberry fields were planted to Pinot Noir vines in 1970. The first barrels of Ponzi Pinot Noir were produced in 1974 and the wines made it to the Portland market in 1976, all 96 cases of it.

Pioneering a region and ‘growing milk’

The history of the Willamette Valley’s rich agricultural reputation dates to the native Kalapuyan tribes. When the Ponzis arrived, the Willamette Valley of the 1960s was a bustling agricultural centre, but wine growing wasn’t considered real farming. Luisa recalls being embarrassed by what her parents were doing.

‘I went to Hillsboro High School with other kids whose families had “real” farms,’ says Luisa. ‘Honestly, there was a sense of embarrassment. I never wanted to tell anybody that we were making wine. We used milk cartons instead of grow tubes to protect newly planted vines back then, and some kids on the bus once asked me if we were trying to grow milk,’ she recalls with a laugh.

These days, the Willamette Valley has a reputation as one of the world’s great Pinot Noir regions. Any notion of embarrassment has been replaced with pride in Luisa’s own children. The pioneering Ponzi Vineyards was established as the third bonded winery in the Willamette Valley.

Over time, the Ponzi children would become friends with other kids in the valley. Kids with names like Lett (Eyrie Vineyards), Sokol Blosser and Campbell (of Elk Cove). ‘We’d be playing hide and seek around the corner while our parents were putting together plans to establish the Willamette Valley Wine Growers Association,’ Luisa recalls.

The children of the valley’s founding families remain close to this day, having endured a shared experience. ‘We’re basically cousins,’ she relates.

Understanding that they needed to move away from the valley floor to really produce wines of quality. Dick and Nancy Ponzi purchased hillside sites in 1981, the Madrona and Abetina vineyards. The latter had been planted in 1975 by Oregon State University to over 20 different clones of Pinot Noir. This approach to viticulture would become a key part of the Ponzi vision.

The 1980s and early 90s would see Dick Ponzi’s wines land on the pages of American wine publications, making top 100 lists. As the Willamette Valley’s reputation rose, Ponzi Vineyards was often at the forefront, developing a reputation for producing compelling wines.

The next generation

All of her siblings played a part in the family winery. Her brother Michael became director of operations in the 80s, and her sister Anna Maria became director of sales and marketing in the early 90s.

Having spent years learning from her father, one of the valley’s most revered names, Luisa Ponzi sought formal wine education in Burgundy. There, she apprenticed with M Christophe Roumier of Domaine Roumier in Chambolle Musigny and Italian producer Luca Currado of Vietti in Piedmont.

She would return to the Willamette Valley and the family winery in 1993. She was the first American woman to earn the Certificate Brevet Professionnel D’Oenologie et Viticulture in Beaune. That vintage Luisa became the winemaker at Ponzi Vineyards. Luisa was a year old when her parents planted their vineyards, and picking up the mantle from her father was carrying on the Ponzi legacy as the family estate’s winemaker.

‘Clonal massale’

It’s about the estate vineyards when it comes to the Ponzi wines. Between the winery, now owned by Bollinger and the Ponzi family, there is a total of 68 planted hectares (170 acres). Between the original 4ha, some small hillside vineyards purchased in the early 1970s and a large 30ha purchase in the late 1980s.

The winemaking at Ponzi begins with their approach to wine growing, which has been a process of refining for Luisa. The vineyard that surrounds the winery is, to Luisa’s thinking, one of the best sites in all of the Willamette Valley. The result of a process of refining and refining each year over the lifetime of Ponzi Vineyards.

It’s all a product of Luisa’s and her father’s approach to viticulture over a 50-year period, and as a result, the vineyard is planted to 22 different clones of Pinot Noir. The tendency to play with different clones goes back to Dick Ponzi’s work with clonal experiments with Oregon State University in the 1970s. When Luisa came back from Burgundy, she planted all kinds of clones that she’d worked with in France.

‘With an older winery like ours, by Oregon standards, our longevity is the product of a series of decisions and stories over time. We didn’t just pick 22 different clones and say, let’s do that,’ Luisa exclaims. The selections were made vintage by vintage. Tasting the grapes and the wines each year and seeing what works well and where. It was a long process of ‘following the clones in the cellar and in the wines and seeing what they do,’ Luisa explains.

‘Clonal massale’ is Luisa’s term for the Ponzi viticultural ethic. A combination of clonal selection and massale selection. She defines ‘clonal massale’ as ‘the planting of several dozen clones in a single block.

These clones are specially selected for the site, and rather than being planted in an organised fashion, each in a different row or block, they are planted at random like wildflowers; despite variations in ripening, the grapes are harvested at the same time.

‘The clonal selections are done with precision,’ Luisa emphasises, ‘but then we mix them all together. I think it reveals terroir better because it’s a mix. We have Spanish, Swiss, California and French clones, it’s anything but a monoculture.’

Ponzi Vineyards at a glance

Founded: 1970

Owner: Groupe Bollinger (purchased in 2021)

Annual production: 38-42,000 cases (12 bottle)

Total hectares planted to vines: 68ha

Appellation: Laurelwood District AVA, which was established in 2020 in large part by the efforts of Anna Maria and Luisa Ponzi.

Estate vineyards: Estate Vineyard (1970), Abetina (1975), Madrona (1985), Aurora (1991-2006), Avellana (2006-2014)

Key wine varieties: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris

Winemakers: Dick Ponzi (1970 to 1993); Luisa Ponzi (1993 to present)

The winemaking

‘We have a gravity mentality’’ says associate winemaker Max Bruening. This approach is a reflection of Dick Ponzi’s respect for the work done over a year in the vineyard as it transitions to the cellar.

When the new Ponzi Vineyard facility opened in 2013, it was designed to take advantage of gravity on the crush pad and in the cellar keeping the movement of wine as gentle as possible. When they are used, the pumps have governors in them to soften their impact and keep the integrity of the wines and the terroir within them intact.

Whole cluster inclusion and smaller fermentation batches are key components of the Ponzi winemaking process. The focus under the new Bollinger group is on the site-specific, premium Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. Small fermentation lots (with native yeasts) seem to amplify the particular character of a block or a vineyard they may want to emphasise, according to Bruening.

The gentle touch combined with a search for texture is the recipe at Ponzi. This includes low inputs of new oak, particularly on the Chardonnay, from longer barrel ageing and extensive lees stirring. The barrels are bent with steam rather than heat from the toast, looking to minimise wood’s undue influence on the wines.

The Bollinger acquisition

In early April of 2021, the Bollinger group (SJB USA) acquired Ponzi, including the winery and thirty-five acres of vineyards. In October of that same year, Jean-Baptiste Rivail was appointed CEO of Ponzi Vineyards and executive vice president of SJB USA. The Ponzi family has retained 40ha of vineyard land and is under long-term leases with the Bollinger Group.

The Bollinger acquisition of Ponzi was a net positive for everyone to hear Luisa tell it. ‘This has really allowed us to focus in. It’s possible that maybe I was indulged as the winemaker a little bit too much when it was me and my sister,’ Luisa admits. ‘I probably could have benefited from some stronger guidance on how all the wines I wanted to make or was making were doing from a market and sales point of view.’

Rivail has taken an active role in helping the brand develop that focus as part of its reputation moving forward under Bollinger. ‘This terroir, Laurelwood, and these focused wines, the varieties, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and our reserve and single-vineyard bottlings, that’s where we’re focusing.’

‘This is a legacy family in the Willamette Valley, and Luisa has been a pioneering winemaker here. We want to continue and build on that legacy and bring it to the broader world that Bollinger has access and inroads to,’ Rivail reveals.

‘I’ve really been pleased with how much respect we’ve been given as a winemaking team,’ Luisa says. There were a lot of suitors, but Bollinger wanted us to keep doing what we’ve been doing and that made the decision much easier.’

Willamette pioneers Ponzi: Seven wines to try

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Oregon’s Willamette Valley 2021: Vintage report and top-scoring wines

Southern Oregon 2021: Vintage report

In the Pacific Northwest, Washington state’s 2023 wine harvest is getting underway, while those in the cooler Willamette Valley in Oregon bide their time.

Harvest 2023 begins in Washington

Harvest 2023 has begun in the Evergreen State, depending on the site. Growers are largely picking for either sparkling wine or early-ripening white varietals like Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.

‘Harvest is just getting underway,’ reported Gilles Nicault, the director of winemaking for Long Shadows. ‘We picked Sauvignon Blanc from a 1972 block at Bacchus Vineyard (White Bluffs AVA) on 29 August and will pick Stone Tree Vineyard Syrah from the Wahluke Slope on 6 September.’

Elsewhere in the state, winemakers are making preparations for a harvest just around the corner.

‘We anticipate picking Sauvignon Blanc from Novelty Hill’s estate vineyard, Stillwater Creek in the Royal Slope AVA, right after Labor Day, said Mike Januik, winemaker at Januik and Novelty Hill wines. ‘This is quite a bit earlier than last year, but 2022 was late by a couple of weeks.’

Budbreak in Washington was spotted in the Walla Walla Valley in late April. It was a cool spring in Washington state, but things heated up considerably in May. The hot days pushed 2023’s cool start, which was tracking two to three weeks behind towards more recent norms, with bloom seen across the state’s vineyards around 23 May.

After back-to-back unusual vintages, winemakers look forward to the kind of vintage that they’ve come to expect in Washington state.

A more ‘typical’ year

‘It’s been nice to have a “typical” Washington state growing season after more extreme conditions the last few years,’ said Amy Alvarez-Wampfler, winemaker and general manager at Walla Walla’s Abeja.

‘The weather hasn’t been too hot or cold, and there hasn’t been much rain. That’s quite different from the previous years. 2021 was the year of the heat dome. It was warm, dry, and a little windy, which concentrated the fruit. The berries were smaller, and yields were down 15-30% depending on the vineyard. In many ways, last year was the mirror-opposite.

‘In 2022, yields were up 20-30%, depending on the vineyard, and it was a late harvest. We started picking Chardonnay towards the end of September last year, and we brought in our last grapes around mid-November.’

Forecasting a promising vintage

Despite a cool start, the 2023 vintage has rebounded surprisingly. With relatively low yields expected, Washington winemakers anticipating a year of intensity and concentration.

‘The growing season started at least three weeks later than usual, and we are now looking at one of the earliest harvests in my memory,’ said Nicault.

‘Low yields and ideal growing temperatures have boosted perfect ripening, with the grapes achieving beautiful physiological maturity with vibrant character, colour and aromatics.’

After a vintage of copious yields last season, Washington state is expecting a smaller crop in 2023.

‘The crop is significantly smaller this year than in 2022. I’m anticipating intense flavours in 2023 and even ripening,’ Januik said. ‘If the weather holds, we should be wrapped up by the first half of October, perhaps as early as 10 October because of a low crop load.’

‘We believe the fruit quality this year will be excellent,’ added Alvarez-Wampfler. ‘The canopies are even, the vines are well-balanced, and the berries and clusters are small. We did some heavy thinning this year.

‘Last year was a big crop. We anticipate yields will be down by about 20% this year. We won’t start picking fruit at Heather Hill until mid-October. It’s always one of the last vineyards we pick.’

Anticipation builds in Oregon

The Willamette Valley got off to a very slow start in 2023, but things got unusually warm in May with a few days of 32°C (91°F) temperatures. This early heat spike got things moving along quickly.

‘We’ve had a pretty compressed growing season, said Willakenzie winemaker Erik Kramer. ‘But the weather has been pretty cooperative since.

‘The timing between bud break and bloom was very short due to a warm spring, something like 10 days shorter than longer-term averages. Additionally, we had some heat roll through the area in August that seems to have advanced the calendar by a few days.’

The vintage has many thinking of warm years like 2018, 2015 and 2016 when fruit was ripe, and the wines were very approachable in their youth.

‘So far so good, the crop is looking very healthy,’ said Anne Sery, winemaker at NW Wine Company. ‘A quite late bud break was balanced by a warm summer.

‘The end of August looks to be cool, and the bits of rain and cooler days will help slow down the sugars, allowing the tannins to ripen and the skins to thicken. Right now, it reminds me of a combination between 2018 and 2015.’

Sery added, ‘I say 2018 for comparable degree days and 2015 for its hot and dry July and August. In 2018 when September came, we were all expecting to pick early, but it ended up taking a few weeks, and we didn’t really start until the third week of September.’

Clusters and complexity

In a region known for producing wines of balance and complexity, a warm vintage may mean different things for winemakers when it comes to picking decisions.

This is particularly salient for house styles based on freshness of fruit, floral character and minerality. Yet complexity can come from a variety of sources.

‘It was a similar start in 2016,’ said Ken Kupperman, vice president of vineyard operations for Jackson Family Wines, Oregon.

‘The clusters were very non-uniform in size this year, even within the same block, which may add some complexity to the wines. This has been a dry and warm year, but canopies have remained healthy. At this point, the season is going into its final phase now, and we’re seeing a cooling trend in the forecast. It’s shaping up very well, perhaps will wrap things up by the end of the first week in October.’

The way things are tracking, winemakers anticipate generous wines with ample fruit character.

‘These wines will certainly show some nice fruit. If the wines are anything like 2016, and I believe they are. They’ll be very fruit-forward and approachable early,’ shared Kate Ayres, PennerAsh winemaker. ‘Yet with so much variability within the blocks, we should see some interesting complexity.’

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On the rise of Oregon Chardonnay, I had a conversation with David Adelsheim, founder of Adelsheim Vineyard and the first chair of the Oregon wine board, about the continuing growth in quality and reputation that has surged over the last decade.

‘Chardonnay isn’t a winemaking technique. It’s a grape,’ he pointed out. ‘In order to make it well, you need winemaking that actually respects the identity of the grape and the variety that you can achieve vintage to vintage.’

Adelsheim advocates for the use of Dijon clones of Chardonnay in the Willamette, where the previously oft-planted ‘selection 108’ from California struggled to ripen.

‘What we’re seeing in the Willamette Valley is a collision of two things; the level of quality possible with careful site and clone selection coupled with a clearer vision of what we can do here. It’s been a gradual recognition over the last ten years or so.’

Scroll down for top-scoring Willamette Valley Chardonnays of the 2021 vintage

In early September, a few days of hot weather pushed some of the Chardonnay sugar levels up. A clutch of producers worried this might create wines with too much ripe fruit, and a lack of freshness, but that simply wasn’t the case.

The wines from the top producers show tremendous balance; there is tension, energy and ripeness. They are among the very best wines made in Oregon’s Willamette Valley for the vintage, showing great balance between energy and richness. Texture, verve and fruit are all of a piece of the top examples from the year. The minerality is finely etched and in the best of these wines, nearly crystalline.

There is ample fruit and, for me, the signature lemon cream, or lemon curd character of Willamette Valley Chardonnay, bears witness to a texture that balances creaminess with the tension of bright fruit.

Simply, the 2021 vintage for Chardonnay in the Willamette is a complete package.

2021 in the Willamette Valley: 5/5

After a particularly challenging 2020, Willamette Valley growers and winemakers were rewarded with a vintage of outstanding quality, with albeit slightly lower yields. The wines up and down the Willamette Valley across varieties show ample ripeness and freshness, and there is plenty of elegance to be had in wines from the top producers.

See all 180 Willamette Valley 2021 tasting notes and scores

Ben Casteel, the winemaker at Bethel Heights, had not seen many Chardonnay vintages like 2021. ‘The 2021 vintage had a flair for the dramatic, with rain coming in during flowering in early June, followed by a nearly three-month stretch without rain and periods of explosive heat,’ he recalls. ‘The crop size was variable depending on the state of the vines during rain, so I anticipated some variation in our pick dates for Chardonnay, but I did not expect the interval from the beginning to the end to be 17 days.

‘We pick our Chardonnay in a fairly tight range in terms of harvest chemistry,’ Casteel continued. ‘I’m a firm believer that if we are going to make wines defined by place, i.e. the limiting conditions defining the vineyard, then our picks shouldn’t vary wildly in measurable ripeness. That means that usually, our picking window is a tidy six to eight days. In 2021 it was double that to achieve the same result.

‘I’ve been very happy to see that with such a broad picking window, where vintage conditions allowed for people to get grapes as ripe as they could have desired, the Willamette Valley as a whole produced some of the most striking and graceful Chardonnays in my memory.’

See the Willamette Valley 2021 score table

Willamette Valley 2021: top five Chardonnays of the vintage:

Bethel Heights, Casteel Estate Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills

Walter Scott, X Novo Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills

Walter Scott, Freedom Hill Vineyard Chardonnay, Mt Pisgah

Cristom, Seven Springs Vineyard Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills

Eyrie Vineyards, The Eyrie Chardonnay, Dundee Hills

Willamette Valley 2021 Chardonnay: 20 of the best

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Bidders around the world joined those in the room at WillaKenzie Estate via livestream as 75 one-of-a-kind wines went under the hammer at the seventh edition of ‘Willamette: The Pinot Noir Auction’.

Top producers created Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wines specifically for the sale, which also put Willamette Valley’s highly rated 2021 vintage in the spotlight.

Only trade members plus ‘guests’ could participate in the sale, said auction house and co-host Zachys. Organiser Willamette Valley Wineries Association (WVWA) said consumers would be able to purchase the one-off wines from winning bidders.

Sales of wine lots fetched a total $543,500 this year, with the final sum raised hitting $680,900 once additional sponsorship funds and ticket sales for in-person events had been included, said WVWA.

It said the average price per lot rose by 10% on last year, to $7,246. There was no buyer’s premium in the auction.

The most expensive lot sold was five cases (60x 75cl) of Bergström Wines’ ‘La Voluptueuse’, Pinot Noir 2021, which fetched $35,000, translating to an average price of around $583 per bottle, said WVWA.

Created by winemakers Josh Bergstrôm and Maddy Rausch, the wine is a blend of the ‘oldest vine parcels from our two original family vineyard plantings: the Bergström Vineyard in the Dundee Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA) and Silice in the Chehalem Mountains AVA’, the winery said in the Zachys auction catalogue.

Other top lots included:

• Five cases of Antica Terra, ‘Alder Creek’ Pinor Noir 2021 | (sold for) $15,000
• Five cases of Alexana Estate, ‘Slack Tide – The Clam’ Pinot Noir 2021 | $15,000
• Twenty cases of Westmount, ‘West Side Story’ Pinot Noir 2021 | $18,000
• Twenty cases of Maison Noir, ‘Lamb of the God’ Pinot Noir 2021 | $13,000
• Five cases of Drouhin Oregon Roserock, ‘Cuvée DG’, Pinot Noir 2021 | $11,000
• Five cases of Soléna Estate and Domaine Divio, ‘Francophillia’ Chardonnay 2021 | $10,500

Ian Burch, auction chair and winemaker at Archery Summit winery, said, ‘The Willamette Valley has come to be recognized as one of the most exciting wine regions in the world, and this auction offers the highest expressions of Pinot noir and Chardonnay from our top producers.’

The sale follows the Willamette Valley Collectors’ Auction in April, also powered by Zachys, which featured library wines spanning 22 years, as well as experiences.

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 ‘The resulting wines are brilliant. They offer great concentration, wonderful lift and freshness and such fine tannins… the top producers have made wonderfully collectable wines that will age 15 to 20 years. A five-star vintage for the Willamette Valley’

The 2021 growing season was memorable, most notably for the heat dome the region experienced in late June when temperatures reached up to 47.5°C (117.5°F). That heat spike set new records by 3°C to 6°C (5°F to 10°F) across the Pacific Northwest. While there was plenty of crop damage, grape vines seemed to come through unscathed.

Many Willamette Valley winemakers I spoke with described 2021 as ‘easy’ and, largely, it was. Particularly in the context of the heartbreaking 2020 vintage – a year which saw unprecedented smoke damage, resulting in many producers not even making red wines. By contrast, 2021 felt largely normal, particularly as growing seasons continue to warm up year on year.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of the top Willamette Valley 2021 red and white wines

2021 Willamette Valley red wine of the vintage

Martin Woods, Hyland Vineyard Pinot Noir, McMinnville

2021 Willamette Valley white wine of the vintage

Bethel Heights, Casteel Estate Chardonnay, Eola-Amity Hills

Climatic dramatics

As the vines went dormant towards the end of 2020, the region’s autumn temperatures remained warm, and conditions were relatively dry. The Willamette Valley’s first dramatic weather event of 2021 happened in February. While the snow and ice storms wreaked havoc with travel and power outages, they had no effect on the dormant vines.

Budbreak occurred across the valley in mid-April, with an early bloom occurring in the first part of June. It was to be the vintage’s most dynamic month, with two significant events having an impact on the final wines: heavy rain and the heat dome.

Heavy rain on 13 June following bloom impacted overall yields, which varied throughout the Willamette Valley. Yields in some places were about 75% of the average. Ironically it may have been rainfalls that allowed the vines to pull through what was the vintage’s signature event. A record-shattering heat dome brought several days of unseen temperatures, with highs of 42.2°C (108°F) on 26 June, 44.4°C (111.9°F) on 27 June and 46°C (116°F) on 28 June.

See all 180 Willamette Valley 2021 tasting notes and scores

Nature’s balancing act

‘After the heat dome, we saw real resilience in the vineyards,’ says Grant Coulter of Hundred Suns Wine. ’Fortunately, the event occurred so early in the growing season, and thanks to the rains, there was plenty of water in the ground to sustain the vines.’

Ian Burch, the winemaker at Archery Summit, added: ‘It takes five times longer to heat up wet soil than it does dry soils, so those rains really helped us stave off any problematic heat dome issues.’

The normally ill-timed rain helped the Willamette Valley’s vineyards make it past the record heat unscathed, and because the spike happened around bloom, the grapes hadn’t begun ripening. Perhaps the vines sacrificed yield to guard against something more pernicious?

While the heat dome drove up the data on things like ‘degree days’, and it was a dramatic event impacting people’s lives throughout the Pacific Northwest, because of the timing and the previous rains, the vines really didn’t notice.

See the Willamette Valley 2021 score table

Willamette Valley vintage ratings

2021 5/5

After a challenging 2020, growers and winemakers were rewarded with a vintage of outstanding quality, albeit with slightly lower yields. Up and down the Willamette Valley and across different grape varieties, wines show ample ripeness and freshness, and there is plenty of elegance from top producers.

2020 2/5

A picture-perfect vintage all but destroyed by wildfire smoke from the high pressure and wind event around the Labor Day weekend (5-6 September). Many wineries did not even produce red wine in 2020; those that did saw varied impact from smoke taint. There were some well-made white wines, Chardonnay in particular.

2019 5/5

While yields were lower, 2019 was a throwback to the classically cool and elegant vintages that made the Willamette Valley’s Pinot Noirs famous. For the first time in recent memory, temperatures were lower than the year prior and there were late rains. For long-standing winemakers, it was return to the good old days.

2018 4/5

A warmer-than-average year, with few heat spikes and an overall balanced growing season, resulting in what many growers and winemakers called ‘ideal conditions’. Wines were lush and balanced thanks to late-season cool temperatures that tempered ripeness and alcohol.

Coasting to the finish

After a dramatic June, it was relatively smooth sailing. A shift to cooler temperatures in September and October meant phenolic ripeness was able to catch up with the sugar levels. There was also the first noteworthy rain in more than 90 days – more than 2.5cm (one inch) of rain on the weekend of 18 September. Most winemakers and viticulturists referred to the state of the fruit at harvest as nearly perfect. The vintage produced both fantastic Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

The resulting wines are brilliant. They offer great concentration, wonderful lift and freshness and such fine tannins. This is a cellar-worthy vintage, and the top producers have made wonderfully collectable wines that will age 15 to 20 years. A five-star vintage for the Willamette Valley.

‘It was a gift,’ says Jason Lett, owner and winemaker at The Eyrie Vineyards. ‘We had a long picking window that was integral to fruit integrity. The grapes had an ideal chemistry at that point, and the acidity and phenolics will warrant long ageing. These wines are wonderful!’

Willamette Valley 2021: the top scoring wines

The following wines scored 95 points or above and are listed white then red in score order.

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After tasting 180 wines from the 2021 vintage in the Willamette Valley, Clive Pursehouse presents a mix of top scorers, solid performers and wines to seek out.

Here we present a quick and easy way to see tasting notes and scores for all 68 wines that scored 94 points or above.

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Oregon's Willamette Valley 2021: vintage report and top-scoring wines

The Frescobaldi family has been producing wine in Tuscany since the 14th century, building up a client base that included Michelangelo and King Henry VIII.

Its iconic estates include Ornellaia, CastelGiocondo, Castello Nipozzano and Castello Pomino.

Marchesi Frescobaldi has close links to the Mondavi family in California, but this marks its first winery acquisition in the United States.

Marc-André Roy and Jared Etzel set up the 16ha-estate of Domaine Roy & fils back in 2012.

Their fathers – Robert Roy and Michael Etzel – established Beaux Frères, one of the most prestigious wineries in the Willamette Valley, in 1991.

They wanted to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, so they teamed up with 26 friends from Quebec to launch the second-generation wine business more than a decade ago.

Marc-André Roy currently serves as the company president and Jared Etzel – who grew up at Beaux Frères – is the winemaker. He produces wines exclusively from grapes grown on the estate, which is 100% organic and farmed without irrigation.

Pinot Noir is the main grape variety grown at Domaine Roy & fils, but it also has a 2ha-plot dedicated to Chardonnay.

‘We are humbled and thrilled to welcome the Frescobaldi family as the new owners of Domaine Roy & fils,’ said Marc-André Roy. ‘Their esteemed winemaking heritage and commitment to excellence align perfectly with our own values. We believe this partnership will preserve and elevate the legacy of Domaine Roy & fils.’

Under the terms of the sale, he will continue to lead Domaine Roy & fils in collaboration with the Frescobaldi family as a minority owner and board member. The sale price was not disclosed.

Lamberto Frescobaldi, the president of Marchesi Frescobaldi, studied viticulture and oenology at University of California, Davis, and he has long been keen to expand into the United States.

He said: ‘At this stage of our expansion we decided to seize the opportunity to acquire the beautiful Domaine Roy & fils winery in Oregon, one of the best regions in the world for Pinot Noir.

‘To become part of such a community is a dream come true. On behalf of the Frescobaldi family I would like to thank Marc-André Roy for offering us the opportunity in Oregon to continue to do what we do best, cultivate beautiful vineyards, produce wines and offer our customers iconic products.’

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• Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2019: Vintage report and 30 wines

After a stretch of warm years from 2014 to 2018, the 2019 vintage was cool and wet in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Many winemakers welcomed a return of conditions more common a decade ago, emblematic of the elegant wines that have buoyed the region’s global reputation.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of 30 Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs from the 2019 vintage

That elegance and balance of fresh fruit character is a signature style of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, as well as sous bois (forest floor) elements.

‘The wines from 2019 have a youthful exuberance that is so exciting,’ says Shane More of Zena Crown. ‘They ring with freshness, vibrancy and vitality. Our 2019 Pinots are exhilaratingly pure and will live for decades.’

‘When I think about the 2019 vintage,’ says Alex Sokol-Blosser, president and winemaker of Sokol Blosser, ‘I think about an Oregon vintage that is more typical. We had a nice growing season, and then it started to rain in September before things were ripe. Rain is part of the deal here in the Willamette Valley, and it’s hard to get out of that deal unless you want to move.’

It was a cold, early spring, and frost brought challenges in colder spots within the Willamette Valley. The wet July – highly unusual in any year here – made managing powdery mildew a challenge early on during ripening. Then there were significant rains in late September which delayed ripening.

‘So patience was the name of the game,’ Sokol-Blosser continues. ‘Several rain events in September really pushed my patience level.’

Jessica Mozeico, owner and winemaker at Et Fille, says it was an ‘absolute relief’ to see a return to a cooler growing season in 2019. ‘After warmer vintages punctuated by heat spikes and dryness, we finally saw cool harvest temperatures and rain.

‘The rain came in waves at bud break, just after bloom and before harvest,’ she says. ‘This created some disease pressure, but it also moderated brix [the sugar level in the grapes that determines potential alcohol]. It allowed us to let things hang a bit for phenolic and flavour ripeness and retained pH nicely.’

A breath of fresh air

The much-needed respite of these cooler conditions allowed the vines to recover physiologically. The 2019 vintage in the Willamette Valley saw 400 fewer growing degree days than the intensely warm 2018 vintage – 2,101 compared to 2,502.

‘Coming off the hotter previous years, the vines went to bed in autumn relatively stressed,’ explains Cliff Anderson of Anderson Family Vineyards. ‘They yellowed fast, dropped leaves and went dormant right after harvest. In our experience, stress during and after harvest one year can tend to produce thinner skins and lighter, more elegant wines the following year.’

‘We saw this in 2004 after the harvest heat wave in 2003. And I think this phenomenon set the tone for 2019,’ he adds.

The quality of the Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2019 vintage is undeniable for fans its trademark fresh fruit, earthy minerality and bright acidity. Wines capable of ageing and far more comparable to Burgundy than California Pinot Noir.

‘2019 is the highest-toned, lightest-coloured Pinot we’ve made in recent years,’ Anderson remarks. ‘More like the elegant wines that put Oregon on the map back in the 1980s.’

Mozeico agrees: ‘This vintage definitely shows up in the wines. They are livelier, brighter and more energetic than the few preceding vintages, with higher acidity and more moderate alcohol levels. Our goal for Pinot Noir is to display complexity, balance and authenticity to place and time, which I think the 2019 vintage affords.’

Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2019: 30 top wines to try

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To put it mildly, the partnership behind the Willamette Valley’s Nicolas-Jay, is an unusual alliance.

Jean-Nicolas Méo, the descendant of an important French political family and Jay Boberg, a music and recording entrepreneur from Los Angeles, together created a new property in Oregon in 2010.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for six Domaine Nicolas-Jay wines

Boberg’s sister had been at university in Philadelphia with Méo and, after meeting in 1988, the two families became friendly.

 At the helm of the prestigious Méo-Camuzet estate in Vosne-Romanée, Méo was aware that Boberg was looking for investors to expand production. Seeing the Drouhin family have great success with its Oregon estates, Méo decided to follow in their footsteps to the Willamette Valley. He and Boberg had similar tastes and ideas about wine and so the partnership was formed.

The first vintage for Nicolas-Jay was in 2014. Initially, the pair bought fruit from selected vineyards, up to nine of them. However, as the brand became more established, they could buy the Bishop Creek property when it came on the market in 2015 and have subsequently planted more acreage near their new winery.

Although they did produce limited quantities of single-vineyard wines, their primary focus is on a blended Pinot Noir from various growers in Willamette Valley. Boberg explains: ‘In Burgundy, estates mostly make wines from their single vineyards, so Jean-Nicolas is intrigued by the prospect of making a blended wine.’

In 2018 they created L’Ensemble, a selection of the best barrels. This cuvée is meant for ageing and cellaring. In contrast, the Willamette Valley bottling is crafted for early drinking. However, it’s a wine that does age well.

Burgundian model

Tracy Kendall is the on-site winemaker, though Méo spends up to two months a year in Oregon to supervise the harvest and the wine production. Not surprisingly, the winemaking follows the Burgundian model.

‘From the outset,’ says Boberg, ‘Jean-Nicolas didn’t want to make Pinot with high alcohol and extraction, even though such wines used to be very popular in Oregon. Our alcohols never exceed 13.5%.’ The grapes are de-stemmed, given a moderate cold soak and then fermented. Ageing takes place in mostly François Frères barrels that are one-third new, and the wines are bottled without fining, filtration, or sulphur dioxide additions.

The partners believe the harvest is even more critical than the winemaking methods. Boberg insists: ‘Picking dates are crucial and trump other factors such as fermentation temperatures. We remain close to our growers and like them to pick our parcels early in the day when temperatures are coolest. We respect their expertise, and they do their best to accommodate us so that we obtain the fruit we want.

Picking dates were less relevant in 2020 when the thick smoke from forest fires hung over the valley for eight days. It became apparent that the skins would be smoke-tainted, so Méo and Boberg decided to produce a white wine from the Pinot Noir grapes. By direct-pressing, as for a Chardonnay, the juice would flow and ferment untainted. Hence Fleur Blanche. Although the wine has met with a positive response, it’s still being determined whether it will be a one-off or a niche addition to the range in future.

The tasting made clear that these wines develop more complexity with some bottle age.

This article follows from Matthew Luczy’s producer profile on Domaine Nicolas-Jay published in 2020

Domaine Nicolas-Jay: six wines tasted

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The Willamette Valley is one of the top locations in the US for cool-climate grape growing; Pinot Noir and Chardonnay shine here.

The region has established star producers, and the Burgundian transplants setting up shop are also well-known. At the same time, this has always been a place where new and up-and-coming wine talent has thrived.

Here we discover eight of the Willamette Valley’s exciting new producers.

Scroll down to discover Charles Curtis MW’s eight rising stars of Willamette Valley, plus tasting notes and scores for 20 of their wines

Abbott Claim

The Abbott Claim winery released its first vintage in 2020, but the story began nearly twenty years before.

In 2001 Ken Wright planted roughly 6.5ha of the vineyard on Savannah Ridge in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. The site’s soils are poor and well-drained; Willakenzie soils of decomposed sandstone.

Wright sold the undeveloped portion of land to South African vintner Antony Beck. Beck cleared and planted another 8ha before purchasing the original vineyard planted by Wright in 2012. In 2017 Beck hired transplanted French winemaker Alban Debeaulieu whose prior winemaking credits include Domaine Drouhin Oregon, 00 Wines, and Chapter 24.

At Abbott Claim, Debeaulieu crafts precise wines that express the nuance of this Savannah Ridge terroir. He ferments the Pinot Noirs in concrete with about one-third whole clusters, gently destemming the rest and pumping over gently, with just a few punch-downs near the end of fermentation. After fermentation, he ages the wine in cask for an average of 16 months.

Abbott Claim has planted a Chardonnay vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA, but is currently making wine from purchased fruit. There is a vineyard-designate Chardonnay from the X Omni vineyard, as well as a Willamette Valley blend of the Seven Springs, X Omni and Roserock vineyards.

The Chardonnay is lightly crushed, firmly pressed and barrelled down for fermentation with nearly all the lees in the 30% new oak casks. The cool Eola-Amity Hills climate brings a lemony freshness to the wines here, while the winemaking imparts a smoky reductive edge. The Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are both worth seeking out.

Audeant

Chicago-based investor Teal Walker and her partner founded Audeant (from the Latin for ‘let them dare’) in 2016. A visit to Antica Terra inspired the pair on a wine-tasting tour of the Willamette Valley. They tasted with Oregon native Andrew Riechers, the assistant winemaker of Antica Terra’s owner-winemaker Maggie Harrison.

Riechers had worked in California, Oregon, New Zealand and Burgundy before arriving at Antica Terra, where he worked alongside Harrison for five years. Walker and Riechers leveraged their contacts in the local industry to source fruit for their initial bottlings from Nysa Vineyard (Dundee Hills AVA), Luminous Hills Vineyard (Yamhill-Carlton AVA) and Cherry Grove Vineyard (Tualatin Hills AVA).

With the 2018 vintage, they added a small amount of Chardonnay from the renowned Seven Springs Vineyard. They are developing vineyards at their Parrett Mountain estate, which they planted in 2017 and 2018 at just over 300m. Riechers is particularly enthusiastic about the potential for higher-elevation sites in the Willamette Valley.

In the winery, Riechers charts his own course. Without forsaking the lush, sensual appeal of the wines of his mentor Maggie Harrison, he exercises a bit of restraint. ‘I probably pick a bit earlier than Maggie and use less new wood, but I still rack them into barrel with as many solids as possible.’

Riecher’s approach to making Chardonnay hews more closely to that of his Burgundian mentors. The fruit is lightly crushed and pressed oxidatively before being racked into barrel with little or no settling to bring out the smoky Meursault-like reductive edge in the wines. The tanks are up to one-third whole clusters and Riechers finishes the alcoholic fermentation in the barrel, so there is still plenty of CO2, which helps to maintain freshness.

Cho Wines

Dave and Lois Cho are one of the newest proprietors in the Willamette Valley, established in 2020. They are the first Korean-American vintners in Oregon.

They shipped their first bottles in May of their first year. By the time they finished picking the 2021 vintage, they had purchased 31ha, about half of it plantable in the Chehalem Mountains.

The couple is no stranger to thinking outside of the box. They initially met as buskers on the streets of Santa Monica and played music at wineries in Napa Valley. Bitten by the wine bug, the couple moved to Oregon, where Dave studied winemaking at Oregon State. Upon graduation, Cho worked at Stoller Family Estate and Argyle Winery, where he developed his evident passion for sparkling wine production.

Of the seven wines we tasted, six were Pinot Noir. The Cho’s, however, craft Oregon’s signature grape in many guises. They’ve created blanc de noirs, both still and sparkling, rosé, a couple of dry, still reds, and even a Piquette. A pét-nat of Pinot Gris fills out the range.

The Cho’s inventive thinking and undeniable enthusiasm will stand them in good stead as they grow their business, a pandemic project like no other.

Hundred Suns

Grant Coulter and his wife Renée Saint-Amour arrived in Oregon in 2006 after Coulter finished his winemaking degree from Fresno State.

Coulter found work at Hamacher and then at Beaux-Frères, where he worked for a decade, eventually as head winemaker. The couple left Portland in 2015 and moved to the Willamette Valley, intending to start their project. Coulter maintains a ‘day job’ overseeing the vineyards and winemaking at Flaneur while he and his wife build their label.

They began by sourcing fruit from some of the best-known vineyards in the state and recently purchased and re-planted a vineyard near their home in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. Although their focus is mainly on the Willamette Valley, Coulter shows versatility by working with Syrah and Cabernet grapes from the River Rock Vineyard in The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater AVA south of Walla Walla Washington, as well as with Syrah from the Columbia Gorge AVA.

One common thread is the frequent use of whole-bunch fermentation. Coulter also says he leans toward a neutral oak profile since ‘I’d rather have grape tannins and texture, not (oak tannin) from France.’ He experiments with fermentation in amphorae for both Pinot Noir and Syrah, and his Chardonnay is delicious.

He presses whole clusters without crushing beforehand and ferments in oak casks with a modest proportion of new wood. Chardonnay from higher elevation sites such as the Lone Feather Vineyard in McMinnville AVA and Koosah Vineyard in Eola-Amity Hills yield just the type of lemony, steely fruit for which Hundred Suns is known.

JC Somers

Although the JC Somers label is brand new, founder Jay Christopher Somers has been making wine in Oregon for 30 years (he founded the label J. Christopher in 1996).

He took on famed German winemaker Ernst Loosen as a partner, but the two parted ways in 2019. Somers and his wife Ronda started from scratch, working out of the Carlton Winemakers Collective.

He is currently producing Pinot Noir from the Bella Vida and Abbey Ridge Vineyards in Dundee Hills, as well as a blended Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. He makes a distinctive Sauvignon Blanc from the Croft Vineyard that lies in the Willamette Valley AVA southwest of the Eola-Amity Hills AVA.

‘A 1985 d’Angerville Champans changed my life,’ Somers explained as we discussed wine style and winemaking. He values elegance and finesse, characters perfectly suited to the Dundee Hills Pinot with which he works.

The grapes are destemmed and fermented gently on native yeasts before 18 months of ageing in casks. There is minimal intervention during the process, with only one racking and no fining before bottling.

The Chardonnay is pressed as whole clusters and fermented in 500- and 600-litre Damy LL++ Jura puncheons with wood from the Jura, while the Sauvignon Blanc is fermented half in concrete egg and half in stainless steel for an unrivalled purity of fruit.

Limited Addition (Ltd. +)

True to their minimal-interventionist ethos, Bree and Chad Stock keep a reasonably low profile among the general public. If their roles are somewhat behind the scenes in Oregon wine, it is not for lack of talent, experience or connections.

Bree Stock is an Australian-born Master of Wine who worked as a sommelier in Canada before returning to Australia and ultimately landing in Oregon. Among myriad commercial and educational roles, she is currently the Director of Education for the Oregon Wine Board.

Chad Stock worked at Rudd in the Napa Valley and Antica Terra in the Willamette before launching several wine brands. The two formed Constant Crush Advisors in 2017. They focus on minimal intervention and vineyard establishment for alternative grape cultivars.

The pair launched their marquee project Limited Addition Wines to focus on grapes sourced in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. These grapes will be familiar: Gamay, Cabernet Franc, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Others, less so: Trousseau, Gruner Veltliner and Mencia.

All of the wines, however, are impeccably made. Some of their bottlings mark an accessible style that would not be out of place in the state’s best cellars.

The Stocks, however, also know how to stretch the boundaries with skin contact orange wines, méthode ancestrale pét-nat bottlings and Piquette, a low-alcohol beverage made from grape pomace and water. Ltd + shows that classic Oregon and cutting-edge are not in conflict.

Martin Woods

Martin Woods is the winery established by Evan and Sarah Martin, located, as one might guess, deep in the woods. The site is exceptional, at the top of the slope in the cool-climate McMinnville AVA in the foothills of the Coastal Range.

The portfolio of wines the Martins produces there is broad and begins with a distinctive range of Rieslings from McMinnville’s Hyland Vineyard, fermented in tanks but aged in old, neutral barrels. These can vary from lime-tinged, bone-dry emulations of the Clare Valley to a pitch-perfect evocation of an Auslese Goldkapsel from the Mosel.

For his Chardonnay, Martin ferments partly in older barrels made of local Oregon oak called Oregon White Oak (Quercus Garryana), air-drying his staves. The oak has a tighter grain than French oak and marks the wine only lightly.

Martin presses whole cluster without using sulphur. The juice is then racked to barrel with all or most of the lees. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the wines are not overly reductive and exhibit a lush, approachable character with broad appeal.

According to Martin, the key to getting Pinot right is to pick with as low potential alcohol as possible but with brown seeds. Martin always uses some proportion of whole-cluster fermentation, and it usually takes three to four days to start the fermentation naturally in McMinnville.

Punching down starts about one-third of the way through the ferment, which peaks at 27° C. The wine is pressed off the skins promptly and racked into barrels with all the lees for ageing for up to 22 months.

Morgen Long

Seth Morgen Long is a Willamette Valley Chardonnay specialist, making some of America’s most compelling wines from this grape. He began his wine career barely a dozen years ago in Oregon and worked harvests in California, Central Otago and Meursault.

Seth is enthusiastic about the potential for Willamette Valley Chardonnay, particularly for the grapes he buys from Seven Springs and Craig William’s X Omni project. The X Omni fruit is composed of 15 different clones, but Long also notes that ‘what’s old is new again, and now everyone wants [the old Davis clones] Draper and Wente.’

He picks relatively early, as is the practice of his mentor Etienne de Montille with whom he interned. ‘If I’m going to sacrifice anything, it’s sugar,’ he continues, noting that he typically picks at 12.5% potential alcohol to get the incisive raciness he values.

Long is looking for the smoky, reductive style of Chardonnay popularised first in Burgundy, which is now gaining popularity everywhere. He typically crushes the fruit and presses quite firmly; ‘A decent amount of rolling [of the press, to extract phenolics], not as much as some of my peers but more than most,’ is how he describes his press cycles. The result is a Chablis-meets-Meursault mashup that is endlessly lively without lacking charm.

See Charles Curtis MW’s 20 wines from the rising stars of Willamette Valley

Wines are listed in descending score order per style; sparkling, white, red

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While it doesn’t enjoy the profile of Willamette Valley’s renowned Pinot Noir or rising star Chardonnay, Pinot Gris remains an important wine for the region’s growers and producers.

The acknowledged founding father of Willamette Valley, the late David Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards, planted varieties based not on a Burgundian model but rather on what made climatic sense. Pinot Gris was a big part of those early calculations. In his 1992 speech entitled ‘The Emergence of Pinot Gris’, Lett joked that the variety was still emerging at the time, recalling the slow sales that Pinot Gris found in the early days at Eyrie.

Scroll down to see Michael Alberty’s selection of 23 top Willamette Valley Pinot Gris wines

He claimed to have bartered much of his annual 25-case production from 1971 to 1981 with regional salmon fishermen, given the tough time he had selling it.

Lett was responsible for America’s first commercial Pinot Gris. Bringing ‘about 160’ cuttings north from the University of California, Davis variety collection, these were among Eyrie’s original vineyard rows. There are now a few Pinot Gris wines coming from Oregon’s more southern wine-growing regions, primarily the Umpqua and Rogue Valleys, but only a handful. It is the Willamette Valley leading the charge.

Key styles

While it is a broadly cool growing region, the Willamette Valley AVA contains plenty of climatic variety – there are 11 sub-appellations as of 2022. Three styles have consequently emerged.

First are the nearly ubiquitous bright, fresh wines made in stainless steel that highlight their crisp, fruity character and zippy acidity. Secondly, there has also been a surge in skin-contact Pinot Gris, most (correctly) referred to as ramato. These wines follow the winemaking tradition of Italy’s Friuli region, specific to the Pinot Grigio grown there.

Finally, a few producers are making a style of Pinot Gris that’s more associated with the traditional wines of The Eyrie Vineyards. These are complex, ageworthy, premium-priced white wines, often from old vines or well-sited vineyards, using neutral oak or concrete.

Today, Pinot Gris is the second most widely planted variety in the state of Oregon (though it only represents about a quarter of the total of the state’s Pinot Noir). But, despite the volume, Pinot Gris seems to lag behind Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and arguably even Riesling when it comes to local cachet and buzz.

However, the global popularity of easy-drinking, wallet-friendly Italian Pinot Grigio has been an unexpected benefit: by comparison, Willamette Valley Pinot Gris has developed a national reputation thanks to its superior quality.

King Estate has almost single-handedly buoyed the variety’s market share, committing to the grape and producing more than 1.2 million bottles a year. The self-proclaimed ‘King of Pinot’ makes about 10 variations of Pinot Gris (all biodynamic), including single-vineyard and limited-availability cuvées. The grape’s popularity has helped fashion a broader Willamette style – approachable, aromatically fruit-forward, light-bodied, fresh, crisp and easy-drinking.

Perhaps equally importantly, these wines are affordable – often below $20 in the US market. Though also, perhaps, in the establishment of that signature style, Willamette Pinot Gris has hemmed itself in. Is this approachable, easy-drinking style the full realisation of the variety’s potential here? Does this ubiquity limit producers’ and consumers’ aspirations?

A fresh approach

Should there be any doubt about the potential of Willamette Pinot Gris to produce a more contemplative wine, look no further than The Eyrie Vineyards’ Original Vines Pinot Gris. Made with grapes from vines of more than 50 years old – the valley’s first – it has depth, seriousness and noteworthy ageability. It’s far more grand cru in its stature than easy-drinking.

For Eyrie’s second-generation winemaker and David’s son Jason Lett, however, there is a sense of frustration. ‘There was a time when Pinot Gris was being explored seriously for things like site specificity. Between what my father was doing and other pioneers such as Don Lange, there was a real commitment to making Pinot Gris with a sense of place.

‘That is not how the wine is being approached today. I believe the Willamette Valley is quite possibly the place where a kind of grand cru Pinot Gris can be made. It’s really about climate: Pinot Gris ripens best in cool conditions, and that’s what we have here. This is really where it belongs.’ Lett is excited about burgeoning producers who are raising the profile of Pinot Gris among new wine drinkers, sommeliers and chefs. Wineries such as Maloof and Fossil & Fawn are breathing new life into the variety. The focus on Pinot Gris at Fossil & Fawn is a nod back to David Lett’s 1992 speech in which he said: ‘It is high time viticulture and grape variety adaptation become the focus of premium winemaking on the West Coast.’

That spirit drives Fossil & Fawn’s Jim Fischer and Jenny Mosbacher. ‘We did not endeavour to revolutionise Pinot Gris in Oregon,’ Mosbacher says. ‘I wish I could say we did. Our mission from the beginning was to do our best to represent the care that went into tending the grapes by making the best wines we could.

Greater understanding

Skin-contact, ramato or vin gris wines are leading the next wave of Pinot Gris from the Willamette Valley. Electric-hued wines with mouthfeel and texture are a great fit for the new demographic of wine drinkers and the always-edgy Portland restaurant scene clamouring for orange wines.

For Fossil & Fawn, it’s not about being on trend, but treating the wine in a way that makes the most sense. ‘It’s wild to think that Santa Margherita [in Italy’s Alto Adige] is credited with making the first white Pinot Grigio in 1961,’ Mosbacher says. ‘Since 2014, we’ve been making Pinot Gris exactly as we do our Pinot Noir. For us, it makes sense to vinify these two varieties in the same way: to treat Pinot Gris with the same sort of reverence in the cellar as we do Pinot Noir.

‘As a wine community, now more than ever we have a greater understanding of the genetics of Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris – the only difference being a few select pigment markers in the DNA.’

Thanks to its myriad sub-AVAs, styles and price points, Willamette Valley Pinot Gris offers a style for all – from the popular, affordable fresh and crisp Pinot Gris (in cans as well as bottles) to more earnest, ageworthy wines that reflect their terroir, as well as ramato-style wines for hipster wine bars. It’s time to find the one for you.

Five Willamette Valley producers to know

Selected by Michael Alberty

These talented young Pinot Gris producers have a lot in common. They largely avoid the Pinot Noir arena, are self-taught and their winemaking practices embrace skin contact, minimal intervention and modest alcohol.

Championship Bottle

Based in Amity, winemaker Saul Mutchnick makes a variety of minimal-intervention whites for his Championship label, including an exceptional Pinot Gris. In 2020, Mutchnick abandoned skin contact to make his Out on Love Pinot Gris as a white wine. Its clean, acid-driven beauty has Mutchnick thinking he might just keep his Pinot Gris white in future vintages.

Fair Moon Wine

Fair Moon is a one-woman natural winemaking operation out of Amity, where Jessica Wilmes believes Pinot Gris’ purpose in life is to be orange. Her debut skin-contact Pinot Gris, the Sunshine Effect 2020, is a worthy homage to two producers who inspire her: Gravner and Radikon. Wilmes added Auxerrois and Tinto Cão to her line-up in 2022, so keep an eye out.

Maloof Wines

Bee and Ross Maloof stay out of nature’s way as much as possible while making some of the Willamette Valley’s best Pinot Gris in Forest Grove. Before winemaking, Bee was a materials engineer in the aerospace industry, while Ross was a sommelier for a vegan restaurant in Philadelphia. They both love pizza, as their ‘eat pizza, suck glass’ winery motto makes clear.

Mujita Wine Co

Lizzy Esqueda’s first wine for her Mijita label is a skin-contact Pinot Gris aged in neutral oak and old acacia barrels. It is absolutely brilliant juice: I wish Pinot Gris lovers everywhere could taste it. Esqueda makes her wines at PDX Revolution in downtown Portland, one of the world’s few all-female winery incubator/cooperatives. Wherever Mijita moves next, I’m following. 2025 SE 7th Ave, Portland, OR 97214.

Varnum Vintners

Based in Amity, Cyler and Taralyn Varnum lighten their carbon footprint by using lighter 37.5cl glass beer bottles to house some of their red, white, pink and sparkling wines. My current favourite wine to serve from a beer bottle is a Pinot Gris rosé that was aged on its skins for two weeks. Innovation plus good wine is a winning equation.

Willamette Valley Pinot Gris: Michael Alberty’s top 23 wines to enjoy

Wines are listed in score order by style: sparkling, white, Ramato and skin-contact

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In the 19th century, Portland was the end of the line for pioneers trundling west on the Oregon Trail. Today’s trailblazers converge for the abundant seafood, rainbow of locally sourced produce and wines from around the world as well as Oregon’s 23 AVAs. Supported by an easygoing population of taste-obsessed locals – many of whom have fled San Francisco’s skyrocketing prices over the past decade – a variety of new wine bars, caves à manger, bottle shops and wine-focused restaurants have joined Portland stalwarts over the past decade, transforming the largest city in Oregon into a must visit for wine aficionados.

An abundance of drizzly ‘liquid sunshine’ in winter and spring means planning a visit during summer or early autumn is the best bet for exploring this trendsetting city of flavour geeks, where it comes as no surprise that restaurateurs and sommeliers are open to experimenting with unexpected wine and food pairings. Locals and visitors alike are drawn into the city’s leafy neighbourhoods to kick back at these hyper-local, welcoming places with some of the most innovative, personal wine lists in the country.

Flor Wines

For an insider’s overview of Portland’s weird and wonderful wine world, head to Flor, a downtown bottle shop in the Pearl District, for a conversation with owners Sergio Licea and Andrew Fortgang over a glass of their rotating selection of wines by the glass (or from the bottle you‘ve just purchased). ‘Everyone is welcome here, from novices to collectors,’ says Licea, of the ‘intimidation-free zone’ the Oregon wine luminaries opened in 2021.

Over 500 carefully-curated wines sit on open shelves ready for browsing, while a communal table and swanky lounge area await patrons who want to sip, sit and relax while the downloadable Floral Notes music playlist, which is updated each month, sets the perfect indie vibe.

Oregon wines are well represented, but extensive industry connections allow the owners to source little-known selections from France (about half the stock) followed by Italy, the US and Spain.

Licea says: ‘I’m always on the hunt for good value, fantastic unicorn bottles that will be the trophy wines of tomorrow.’ Speaking of which, the backroom temperature-controlled wine vault contains plenty of top bottles from the best producers in Burgundy, Barolo, and the Northern Rhône.

825 NW Glisan St.

503 206 4736

Canard and Le Pigeon

Sister restaurants Le Pigeon, a 35-seat restaurant with upscale French-inspired fare, and Canard, a casual bistro where American classics get a French twist, highlight the unconventional deliciousness of Portland both on the plate and in the wine pairings. When Le Pigeon opened in 2006, it put Portland on the culinary map. Today, the refined five-course dinner-only menu evolves with the seasons. It’s worth springing for the wine pairing to discover the cellar’s special bottles.

Next door at Canard, French bistro meets American diner in comfort food such as the duck stack: buttermilk pancakes slathered in savoury duck gravy, topped with a fried duck egg (and a slab of foie gras, if you dare). Other favourites include steamed bun burger sliders inspired by the White Castle burger chain. If all this umami-rich food is too much, opt for Pacific coast oysters and a glass of Muscadet. But definitely save room for the soft-serve passion fruit ice cream sundae with a glass of Eugen Müller Riesling. At both unpretentious places, award-winning Chef Gabriel Rucker has built original menus that Portlanders crave, and sommelier Andrew Fortgang (who also co-owns Portland’s Flor wine shop) serves a bevy of unusual French and Oregon wines.

Canard: 734 East Burnside St.

971 279 2356

All day (call ahead for exact hours)

Le Pigeon: 738 East Burnside St.

503 546 8796

Dinner only

Domaine Serene Wine Lounge

Housed in the historic downtown Sentinel Hotel, the upmarket Domaine Serene Wine Lounge draws wine lovers for its classic Oregon Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays produced by Domaine Serene vineyards (located in Oregon’s Willamette Valley Dundee Hills AVA). But since the owners have a winery in Burgundy as well, this quiet spot where locals meet for an after-work glass of wine is also ideal for comparing old and new world styles.

The wine lounge offers traditional Oregon selections such as the Domaine’s Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay and Pinot Noirs from their six different Oregon vineyard estates alongside wines from their Château de la Crée in the Santenay region of the Côte de Beaune (10 hectares of prime vineyard blocks in Pommard, Volnay, Meursault, Puligny-Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet, Santenay and Maranges). And although the wine lounge deserves a visit, we would pass up the slightly tired Sentinel Hotel for the sparkling Kimpton Hotel Vintage nearby, where the updated rooms are named after Oregon wineries, there’s a nightly wine happy hour with live music for guests, and quarterly wine tastings feature local winemakers.

1038 SW Alder Street

503 850 7001

Nil. Wine Bar and Ardor Natural Wines

An earthly paradise for zero-zero and natural wine geeks – or just those seeking to understand what the fuss is all about – this hip, tiny bar and adjacent bottle shop are the project of Victor Martinez, a Berkeley philosophy major who realised, while working in law, that his life’s passion was wine.

After a wine degree from UC Davis and a stint in vineyard management, he now reigns as one of the coolest natural wine experts on the West Coast. ‘I’m interested in the edgier side of natural wines, and I’m not afraid of VA,’ Martinez says with a friendly smile, grabbing a bottle from the clear Lucite cooler.

Sit at the cobalt blue bar and chat, or outside at the sidewalk picnic tables. Then head next door to Ardor where the bottle shop’s simple, clean design is inspired, Martinez says, by the hole in the wall places he loved in France and London. An ideal place to let yourself be guided on a journey through the wild world of new wines from Oregon and California to Europe, New Zealand, Australia and even Mexico.

4243 SE Belmont Street

971 420 6278

Coquine

The hushed, adult atmosphere of this comfortable fine-dining restaurant in a historic building anchoring a corner in the upscale Mount Tabor neighbourhood reflects the restrained, yet complex, nature of Chef Katy Millard’s sustainable, seasonable approach to her craft. Her cuisine du marché has received many accolades and an appearance on a 50 best restaurant list in 2021.

The nightly tasting menu – perfectly complemented by wine pairings from the 450-bottle cellar managed by Millard’s husband and business partner, sommelier Ksandek Podbielski – fuses the chef’s life journey from Zimbabwe to Alabama, Michigan and top kitchens in France and San Francisco.

Podbielski’s extensive experience working in Oregon vineyards and traveling the world inform his cellar choices. For example, he has a whole wine list page devoted to Oregon Pinot, but also highlights other Oregon varietals – for example, Nebbiolo and Aligoté – as well as international wines such as Croatian Plavac Mali and grower Champagnes. The standout from our tasting meal? Roasted rack of Oregon lamb with a glass of claret-like Pinot Noir Rosé de Riceys 2017 from Elise Dechannes’s biodynamic vineyards in the southern Champagne region.

6839 SE Belmont St.

(Corner of SE 69th and Belmont)

503 384 2483

Davenport

In-the-know locals wallow in chef Kevin Gibson’s refined, balanced cooking and his 2,500-bottle strong wine cellar – one of the best in town (which includes many trophy bottles from Burgundy and Champagne that, according to Gibson, are consumed regularly). In fact, many of Portland’s chefs and somms have been mentored by Gibson in the nearly 40 years since he arrived from Iowa. In 2013, Gibson gave a minimalist overhaul to a former comic book store, converting it into a fresh, friendly space with open kitchen overlooking a sweet block of the East Burnside neighbourhood.

If mouthwatering pairings such as duck breast with tart cherry salsa and a bottle of Joseph Voillot Volnay Premier Cru Les Champans 2011 or wild nettle quenelles with morel mushrooms in Meyer lemon cream and a sip of Morgen Long Willamette Valley Chardonnay 2020 sound good, book your table. ‘We’re just ourselves,’ says the modest éminence grise of Portland hospitality, ‘but I do get a lot of thank yous after folks dine here.’ (Gibson suggests clients get in touch in advance if they wish to reserve a special bottle.)

2215 East Burnside St.

kevindgibson@gmail.com (no phone)

Providore Fine Foods

A feast for the eyes and palate, this small, eclectic gourmet grocer, delicatessen, pastificio and bakery is a Portland institution for its picture-perfect presentation of products from around the world, plus local produce almost too gorgeous to eat. Enjoy the newly-expanded wine room featuring wines from Europe, Oregon, and Washington State – plus a bar featuring wines by the glass – and shop here for self-service lunch, grab a glass (or bottle) of wine, and head to the Providore patio for a bit of Portlandia people watching.

2340 NE Sandy Blvd

503 232 1010

Nostrana and Enoteca

Chef Cathy Whims, a seven-time James Beard Award nominee, launched Nostrana in 2005 with the goal of highlighting flavourful, regional Italian cuisine. Locals prefer the bar to the patio or large dining room, and so did we. Following the lead of our enthusiastic bar seat mate, who was bringing an out-of-town visitor to her favourite restaurant for the first time, we ordered a wood-fired, hand-tossed pizza with sausage and honey along with Whim’s renowned radicchio salad and washed our meal down with glasses of house Barbera d’Asti Vietti ‘Tre Vigne’ 2019 (bottled especially for Nostrana) and Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Crowley ‘Flashback’ 2011.

The seasonal pastas, meat and fish dishes are equally enhanced by off-the-beaten path Italian and Pacific Northwest wines chosen by industry veteran Austin Bridges. But his talent really shines next door at Enoteca – Whims’s legendary wine bar – where the postmodern design counters Nostrana’s comfortable traditionalism. The Portland restaurant crowd gathers around the quartz-topped bar after work for the convivial 11pm happy hour when bottles are half price and energy is high.

1401 SE Morrison St., Suite 101

503 234 2427

OK Omens

Re-energized by an understated, millennial-chic renovation in 2021 (open kitchen, cozy bar, gorgeous patio) and packed with a cool clientele, it’s safe to say that the OK Omens experience captures the appreciation of eclectic, adventuresome eating and drinking that makes Portland so distinctive. Since 2018, drinks at the wine-focused restaurant, known for its large selection of Rieslings and emphasis on both natural wines and integrity-driven classics, have been carefully overseen by Brent Braun, a sommelier to watch.

Just reading the menu is fun, thanks to the by-the-glass pairing suggestions such as: ‘Scorchingly dry German Riesling that tastes like licking a steel beam and then taking a shot of coconut lime juice, drink with Torito Salad.’ We thought this was spot on, and the luscious romaine and fried chicken salad tasted even better with a plate of house-made gougères warm from the oven. When Braun suggested a glass of 2017 Camin Larredya Jurançon to top off our meal (along with the butterscotch basil yuzu dessert) our taste buds were blown away. At weekends, watch for special wine flights, such as the recent throw down between Oregon natural wines and Gamays from France’s southern Loire.

1758 SE Hawthorn Blvd.

503 231 9959

Bar Norman and Bow & Arrow

A neighbourhood wine bar and retail shop in NE Portland, Bar Norman is a must-visit institution when it comes to wine. Opened in 2018 by nationally-recognised sommelier Dana Frank – an expert on natural and biodynamic wines – Bar Norman features a big chalkboard with the current wine list, roughly 25 on any given day.

From the urban beach shack-style front patio, doors open onto the white-walled front room with floor-to-ceiling windows. The back room, with a nine-seat bar, communal table and DJ booth is just beyond. Frank’s husband, Scott, spins vinyl most Friday nights. But he’s also a winemaker using Oregon juice, whose subterranean cellar is nearby. His label, Bow & Arrow, pays homage to the refreshing, simple wines of France’s Loire Valley with interpretations on varieties such as Melon, Chenin Blanc and Gamay.

Bar Norman: 2615 SE Clinton St.

Bow & Arrow: 3115 NE Sandy Blvd

Bar Diane

Bursting onto the Portland scene in March 2022, Bar Diane lives up to its goal of ‘making wine fun’. From fresh strawberry pie with a glass of sparkling Beaujolais Gamay Noir to the playful, clean design, to the secret back patio that’s perfect for first dates or long conversations with old friends – this most instagrammable of Portland wine lounges is the ultimate feel-good destination. A rotating selection of simple food (shrimp cocktail, fish of the day, hanger steak, cheese plate) supports the natural wine menu featuring a sparkling, white, red and orange by the glass plus a well-curated bottle list that’s heavy on Loire Valley picks because, as co-owner Kevin Gouy says, ‘that’s the heartland of French natural wines’.

Whether you pop in for Meet the Maker Saturdays, Sparkling Sundays or Magnum Mondays, this neighbourhood spot will make you feel like a Portland insider. As our server put it, summing up the general feel of the Portland wine community, ‘This is a local place, not a BS bougie place’.

NW 21st Avenue between Irving and Hoyt

971 255 1387

Les Caves

One of the most unique wine bars in Portland, if not the country, Les Caves is an 18-seat tasting room that opened in 2017 in a dim, dive-y basement space dating to 1910. Finding the place is half the fun (it’s down an alley; look for the rusted metal gate at the corner of 17th and Alberta) so by the time you’re in, you’re primed for a special experience. You won’t be disappointed. Sip on wines from around the world or trust the bartender by ordering the Winesman’s Pick for a glass (or half-glass) of the bar’s choice – get ready for some unique surprises, because the goal here is to hone in on grapes you might not be familiar with (needless to say, they don’t serve many local Pinot Noirs).

If you can climb a short ladder, reserve the ‘Couch’ – a private, candlelit alcove cut into the wall with a comfy sofa where you can peruse the Missoula Floods map and reflect on how Oregon’s wine country was formed. A 20-seat outdoor porch space (also hidden from the street) opened in August 2021. Hungry patrons devour house-grilled cheese sandwiches on sourdough – the only food served.

719 NE Alberta St.

503 206 6852

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The new Eola-Amity site will break ground in the spring of 2023, with about 8 plantable hectares between 180 and 230 metres in elevation. In addition to the elevation, the property sits right in the path of the Van Duzer Corridor. The gap in the Oregon Coast Range allows a flood of cool pacific air, which tempers the warm summer heat each afternoon – making the Willamette Valley as hospitable as it is for grapes like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

The new Corollary estate vineyards will be planted to four traditional Champagne varieties; Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay. As the property was previously used for timber harvest, it presents a blank canvas for viticulture. Diephouse and Feldkamp will work with a local vineyard management company to explore rootstocks, clone variety and row orientation.

They aim to plant and grow fruit best suited for sparkling wine production and share those lessons with the Willamette Valley wine community. The estate vineyards will be managed using permaculture and regenerative agriculture principles.

The duo at Corollary Wines started considering sparkling wine possibilities in Oregon after the cooler-than-average 2011 vintage, which saw sparkling wines beginning to appear in more Willamette Valley tasting rooms or wine club offerings. ‘Argyle has been leading the charge in sparkling wine here in the Willamette for a long while, but the 2011 vintage saw a surge in popularity throughout the Valley,’ said Diephouse.

Perhaps more importantly, in 2014, Andrew Davis began Radiant Sparkling Wine Company in the Willamette Valley town of McMinnville, bringing the costly and specialised equipment necessary to make sparkling wines to the valley’s many small-production wineries.

This growth in the industry created a broader sample size that convinced Diephouse and Feldkamp, born in nearby Beaverton, Oregon, that the varieties that were successful in Champagne could do well in the cool sites within the Willamette Valley. The couple relocated from the California Bay Area and started making sparkling wine at Corollary in 2017.

Corollary Wines will relocate its production to the new property with plans to develop a tasting room and winery facilities on the estate in 2024.

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On 11 April, 2022, cold temperatures, snow and frost arrived in the Willamette Valley. The pre-dawn hours of 15 April were particularly devastating, with numerous vineyards registering overnight lows of minus three to zero degrees Celsius. Gregory Jones, a research climatologist and CEO of Abacela Winery in Roseburg, Oregon, refers to the event as ‘February in April’ in his weather and climate newsletter.

The frost’s timing was disastrous. Thanks to a warmer, drier Oregon winter, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir buds were already breaking. The frost and sub-freezing temperatures hit those water-filled buds and young grapevines with a vengeance.

The Willamette Valley is defenceless against such attacks because few wineries feel the need to own frost fans or overhead frost protection systems. Given that the region’s last major early frost event occurred in May 1985, this attitude is understandable.

A few days after the frost cleared, Stirling Fox, a vineyard manager and founder of Stirling Wine Grapes, Inc. in Newberg, Oregon, thought some vineyards he visited will end up producing zero fruit. In contrast, others appeared to have little-to-no damage. How many vineyards will end up toward the zero fruit end of the spectrum is up for debate.

‘Based on what I’ve seen and what my peers are reporting, between 50% and 100% of the primary buds in many Willamette Valley vineyards were burned by the frost. At many of these sites, 50% of the secondary buds are burned. Realistically, we’re looking at the Willamette Valley losing half its crop this year,’ Fox said.

After a recent survey of her client’s vineyards, Jessica Cortell of Vitis Terra Vineyard Services in Amity, Oregon, reported seeing the least damage in the Eola-Amity Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA). She described ‘significant damage’ in the Chehalem Mountains AVA, with Chardonnay buds particularly hard hit.

Cortell also agreed with her colleague’s assessment. ‘Overall, it doesn’t look good out there. I think Stirling’s 50% number will be pretty close to what actually happens,’ she said.

Not everyone in the industry is ready to commit to such a dire loss figure however. Leigh Bartholomew is the director of viticulture for Results Partners, a McMinnville, Oregon, company that manages 120 sites in the Willamette Valley. ‘It is hard to know what the crop is going to be like because we can’t see the clusters easily right now,’ she said.

Bartholomew added that she is analysing the damage to primary buds in the approximately two dozen client sites her company describes as ‘severely damaged’. She reports that 40% – 50% of the primary buds appear to be alive even in the worst blocks of the hardest hit locations. She said, ‘That doesn’t even count how many secondary buds will pop out, and we don’t know how fruitful they will be.’

Although there isn’t much research on the topic, a general “rule of thumb” is to expect secondary buds to yield approximately 30% of the crop that primary buds typically produce.

Bartholomew also reports that the damage she sees is mainly located in lower elevation sites. ‘That’s the biggest correlation that we’ve seen. Higher elevation sites that were further behind on bud break are less impacted [by the frost]. Sites that are typically later look better.’

When asked when she thought she might have more concrete answers, Bartholomew said, ‘I keep saying “wait two weeks,” but then it keeps raining, and it is cold and things aren’t as apparent as I want them to be. Once we get past this next rain period, and if it dries out next week, we should have a better idea of the extent of the damage by 13th May.’

It is worth noting that, following the frost that hit the Willamette Valley some 37-years ago, 1985 turned out to be one of the Willamette Valley’s great vintages. The only problem was there was less wine to share with the world.

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Stone will remain on board as a brand ambassador and adviser to the business he created back in 2012. The winemaking team, spearheaded by Thomas Savre and Burgundian consultant Dominique Lafon, is still in place too.

‘We’re all still there and we’re going to keep making great wine, but we will have better resources,’ Stone told Decanter.com.

Stone, a Master Sommelier, purchased the 61 hectares Janzen Farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley on December 31, 2012. He had been working at Evening Land’s adjacent Seven Springs vineyard, and he spotted the land’s immense potential.

‘When I came to run Evening Land, I looked across the road and saw this farm and I thought it had equivalent terroir and better exposure,’ said Stone. ‘I thought I could plant it with better materials and that at some point it could be as great as Seven Springs, or even greater.’

He was 60 years old when he finally bought the land, using money he raised by auctioning off a vast wine collection he had spent four decades building. That was supposed to be his retirement fund, but he ploughed it all into purchasing the farmland. Friends and family also chipped in, raising enough money for Stone to plant the land with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

‘I said, this is like being in Napa Valley in 1890 and being able to buy the best vineyard land for a song. I also compare it to the nobility having to sell their holdings to the commoners during the French Revolution. I was this commoner that was able to buy this great property called Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. It was a privilege to buy this land.

‘I began this project to demonstrate the quality of the terroir you can find in Oregon. I believed in the terroir of Oregon being compare in quality to that of some great Burgundy terroir – not the same as, but in its own way capable of making wines of the same finesse, structure and longevity that you find in great white Burgundy and red Burgundy.’

The original plan was to simply sell the grapes, as he lacked the funds to make wine himself. However, Lafon – one of the elder statesmen of Burgundy, who has been making some of the Cote de Beaune’s finest wines for decades – came on board and the rest is history. His protégé, Savre, became the head winemaker, with Lafon consulting.

The first wines were released in 2015, earning huge critical acclaim. The accolades have continued to pour in ever since.

The twin pressures of Covid and wildfires

By 2020, Lingua Franca wines were sold in dozens of states and 60 international markets, with a strong presence in Europe and Asia. However, Covid-19 and wildfires landed a two-punch combo that threatened to finish off the business.

‘Covid set us back. We had to switch our entire sales strategy to retail for 18 months to two years. We succeeded, but we didn’t grow the way we expected to in 2020, so we were behind on our plans. We then had the fires in 2020 that destroyed our entire vintage.

‘This necessitated a sale. I needed to keep paying people and paying the overheads, but I had no revenue for almost a year.’

Stone initially sought a partner, and he had many suitors, but Constellation came in and offered to buy the winery outright. The Fortune 500 company, whose brands include Robert Mondavi and beers such as Corona and Modelo, has created a new division called Aspira, which is on the hunt for high-quality, organically-farmed vineyards.

It had already identified Lingua Franca as a winery it was interested in, and it swooped when the opportunity arose.

‘The head of Aspira is Robert Hanson,’ said Stone. ‘He is a really forward-thinking person, who is really dedicated to the idea of responsible farming, of having wines with finesse and elegance and that respect the terroir of the place they are grown. It has been a wonderful transition, because I have known some of the people working there for decades. I trained a couple of people there in my days as a sommelier, so it’s a friendly environment that respects what we have done and wants to continue it.

‘So often with a larger company, you think, they’re promising this, but what will they deliver? Because things can change in a big company. But I have to say, they came through on their word down to the letter. Every single vineyard employee, every winemaking employee, every office employee but one, and I have remained with the company and have better positions than we had before.

‘Dominque Lafon is staying on. We’re all there. We’re going to keep making great wine, but we will have better resources to improve our farming and explore polyculture. It’s all very exciting to Aspira.’

In the short-term, there will be a dearth of supply. ‘We won’t have any 2020. Berry Bros in the UK is getting the last of our 2019 vintage. Anyone that likes our wines would be advised to buy what they see now, because there will be a gap, but after that, there will an increase in supply.’

Lingua Franca has previously sold up to 40% of the grapes it grows to fellow producers, but that will now be brought in house. It will also buy more fruit to expand its Willamette Valley brand.

‘We will have a bigger market now. We are limited by our estate size, but we will be able to expand our Avni Willamette Valley brand, so that people who want to have a really good glass of wine that reflects our terroir in Oregon can do so going forward. That will be available in bigger quantities in shops and restaurants.’

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Lower Long Tom is not the name of some long-forgotten punk band. It is Oregon’s newest American Viticultural Area (AVA).

In December 2021, Lower Long Tom became the 10th AVA nestled within the Willamette Valley AVA. It is also the first AVA established in the valley’s southern portion. Its location, 161km southwest of Portland, places it far away from the northern Willamette Valley’s well-established wine scene.

Scroll down for 10 wines to try from Oregon’s Lower Long Tom AVA

The new AVA, of 233ha in production, contains 24 vineyards (see box below) each averaging just 9.71ha. Its 12 wineries produce between 200 and 25,000 cases annually, with most falling at the lower end of that range. ‘We may be a small AVA, but we’re passionate,’ says Matt Shown of Brigadoon Wine Co.

To be recognised as an AVA by the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a winegrowing region must prove it is distinct from neighbouring areas based on criteria such as soils, climate and historical record. Dieter Boehm of High Pass Winery had a strong case when he submitted Lower Long Tom’s AVA application.

The Long Tom name is derived from an English interpretation of a Native American word, possibly ‘Lamphtumpif’ or ‘Longtabuff’, used to refer to a group of Kalapuyan people that lived in the area for thousands of years. The Long Tom River serves as the AVA’s eastern boundary.

Unique soils and climate

Bellpine is the Lower Long Tom AVA’s predominant soil type. The marine sedimentary soil is a shallow layer of silty clay loam over sandstone that is nutrient-poor and fast-draining. These conditions force vines to push into the sandstone to pursue food and water. Shown says harder-working vines mean lighter canopies and smaller grapes, which add concentration to Pinot Noir.

Boehm credits the Bellpine soil for the powerful tannins found in Lower Long Tom Pinots. ‘Because of the soil, we get wines that take a really long time to mature and soften, and they can even seem a little astringent at first,’ says Boehm.

Although the Lower Long Tom AVA is just 97km from the Pacific Ocean, tall peaks in the Oregon Coast Range divert cool maritime winds and rains to the north and south. The resulting warmer vineyard temperatures result in earlier harvests and darker, richer Pinot Noirs than other parts of the valley. ‘We pick a week earlier than they do up in the northern part of the Willamette Valley,’ explains Boehm.

A location at the edge of the Oregon Coast Range, with its dense forests and icy-cold streams, also gives the Lower Long Tom an alpine feel – similar to Jura or Savoie in France. Armies of cows and sheep grazing the region’s rolling foothills only strengthen that impression.

Tight-knit community

Robin Pfeiffer of Pfeiffer Winery planted the area’s first vines in 1984. Boehm of High Pass and Mike and Merry Fix of RainSong Winery added their estate vineyards the following year. Today they are part of a tight-knit, collegial group of producers filled with pride for their hard work and perseverance.

It is also a group hoping to emerge from the shadow of northern AVAs like Dundee Hills and Ribbon Ridge. ‘It can be frustrating when the media says “Willamette Valley”, and they only mean the northern part,’ says Marcus Hall, RainSong’s winemaker and co-owner.

People willing to explore the Lower Long Tom AVA will find more than just the Willamette Valley’s signature Pinot Noirs. Producers here also make dry and off-dry white wines with everything from Sauvignon Blanc to Muscat.

Boehm, for example, was homesick for familiar grapes when he landed in Oregon after escaping East Germany in the 1970s. He remedied the situation by bringing cuttings of Scheurebe, Huxelrebe, Bacchus, Siegfried and Gutedel from his native land back to Oregon. Boehm uses these to make a frisky white called Crazy 8.

This is also the region where Stephen Hagen of Antiquum Farm started his grazing-based viticulture revolution. Hagen pushes beyond basic organic and biodynamic farming tenets by incorporating carefully selected breeds of pigs, geese, chickens, ducks, sheep and guardian dogs into the vineyard system for 11 months of the year.

Moving the animals every three to 21 days is a practice Hagen describes as ‘rotational intensive grazing’. Lost nutrients are continually replenished as above-ground materials are eaten and redistributed into the soil, where appreciative microbiological organisms put them to good use.

The passion is easy to spot in Oregon’s newest AVA.

Lower Long Tom: wineries and vineyards

Wineries

Antiquum Farm

Bennett Vineyards and Wine Co

Bradshaw Vineyard

Brigadoon Wine Co

Benton Lane Winery

Five Fourteen Vineyard

High Pass Winery

Pfeiffer Winery

Poco Collina

RainSong Vineyard

Territorial Vineyards and Wine Co

Walnut Ridge Vineyard

Vineyards

(Many of the wineries above are located on an estate vineyard)

Bellpine Vineyard

Chardonnay Way

Davis Reid Vineyard

Evans Vineyard

Fitzpatrick Vineyard

Gelardi Vineyard

Grace Hill Vineyard

Hildebrand Ranch

Kliewers Weinberg

Kokkeler Vineyard

Moriah Vineyard

Priddy Vineyard

Stroda Vineyard

Sunny Mountain

Union School

Lower Long Tom: wines from Oregon’s newest AVA

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CJ McCollum, of NBA team Portland Trail Blazers, has bought a 129ha (318 acres) vineyard property in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with his wife, Elise.

While the property hasn’t been named, it lies in the Yamhill Carlton American Viticultural Area (AVA) and borders the highly regarded Resonance Vineyard.

CJ McCollum is one of several NBA stars who enjoys tasting and collecting fine wine away from the basketball court, as he described to Decanter following the launch of his McCollum Heritage 91 brand.

With a two-hectare reservoir (five acres), several irrigation ponds and a nursery on-site, the McCollums said this week they have a long-term vision to create a vineyard capable of producing world-class wines.

‘This is wholly undeveloped land,’ a spokesperson for McCollum told Decanter this week.

The couple said they plan to begin laying out the vineyard in 2022, and they plan to work with experts to identify the best clones for particular sites on the property.

‘It’s been just over a year since we announced the McCollum Heritage 91 label, but for far longer Elise and I have had the privilege of exploring various vineyard sites throughout the Willamette Valley,’ said CJ McCollum this week.

‘As we explored the long-term vision of McCollum Heritage 91 and beyond, we truly craved enhancing our sense of place, which is represented by the acquisition of this beautiful property.’

For now, McCollum Heritage 91 wines will continue to be produced at Adelsheim Vineyard, where the NBA star worked with winemaker Gina Hennen to develop his own bespoke range. The first launch, a 2018-vintage Chehalem Mountains Pinot Noir, reportedly sold out in less than one hour after making its debut in 2020.

News that the McCollums have become Willamette Valley vineyard owners is good for the region, said Morgen McLaughlin, executive director of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association.

‘CJ has been a wonderful ambassador for Oregon, through basketball, his local philanthropic efforts and now his interest in making top quality wines from the Willamette Valley,’ she said.

A 2020-vintage Willamette Valley rosé wine has also been released under the McCollum Heritage 91 label, plus a Chardonnay for the One Barrel Challenge initiative – with proceeds going to the Maurice Lucas Foundation – to support efforts to increase wine industry diversity.

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Oregon’s sixth annual Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Auction, on 5 August, raised more than $700,000 (£500,000).

It was the first year with both live (59) and online (38) bidders – during last year’s pandemic, the auction was organised as a purely online sale.

Lots for the Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Auction 2021 each consisted of small-production runs with fanciful names. The auction showcased the wines of the 2019 vintage, which proved to be a return to a classic Oregon style. The top lots by bottle price included five cases each of the following 2019 Pinot Noirs:

• Adelsheim Vineyards, Cheers to 50 Years ($292)
• Antica Terra, Alder Creek ($283)
• 00 Wines, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! ($225)
• Lingua Franca, Up & Up ($217)
• Soléna Estate, L’Elégance ($200)
• Elk Cove Vineyards, The Matterhorn ($200)
• Big Table Farm, The Love Ninja II ($200)

The 2019 vintage in Willamette Valley, Oregon

After a late budbreak and flowering, a fairly large crop was set on the vines. Temperatures during the growing season were moderate but nights remained cool, resulting in wines with bright fruit and crisp acidity. Rain began just before harvest, interrupting the harvest several times.

According to Maggie Harrison of Antica Terra, ‘2019 was the hardest vintage I’ve ever had in my entire life.’

Other vintners were more sanguine. ‘This vintage shows why we should grow Pinot Noir in Oregon. It has flavour, intensity and a silky, ethereal quality to it,’ said WillaKenzie Estate winemaker Erik Kramer. He added: ‘Despite the rain, the fruit was clean; canopy management has improved greatly in the past 15 years.’ Most growers agree that, with rigorous sorting, 2019 will produce satisfying results.

Overcoming challenges

The Willamette Valley has endured a string of challenges in the past year. In July 2020, rampaging wildfires during the growing season led to widespread smoke taint in the grapes. At the same time, residents grappled with the crippling effects of Covid-19 as well as civil unrest during the Black Lives Matter protests in nearby Portland.

Meanwhile, the 2021 growing season ushered in record-setting temperatures during the ‘heat dome’ event as the thermometer climbed to near 50°C.

Despite these notable headwinds, the local community rallied to present their 2019 vintage wines for this year’s auction. Proceeds of the auction benefit the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, which counts nearly 250 members. The Association also partnered this year with the Habitat for Humanity charity to fund The Home that Wine Country Built – a project to provide shelter to a local wine country family in need.

The Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Auction was founded in 2016 by a group of winemakers chaired by Josh Bergström of Bergström Wines and included representatives from Bethel Heights, Gran Moraine, Penner-Ash Wine Cellars, Adelsheim Vineyards and Northwest Wine Co.

The 2021 event was co-chaired by Rob Alstrin of Adelsheim Vineyards and Jessica Endsworth of Northwest Wine Co.

It was announced in the week of this year’s auction that Northwest Wine Co had been purchased from its founders by a group of investors led by local investment firm Casparian Partners. Reputed by the principals to be ‘probably the largest transaction ever done in Oregon wine’, the deal includes more than 283ha of vineyards and more than 300,000 cases annually.

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Expert’s Choice: Oregon Pinot Noir

Oregon wine producer Willamette Valley Vineyards (WVV) has filed a lawsuit claiming that it lost prized Pinot Noir grapes worth nearly US$0.5m due to a neighbouring farmer's use of a herbicide.

In a case filed at Polk County Court, Oregon wine group Willamette Valley Vineyards claims that ‘herbicide drift’ from a neighbouring grass seed farm destroyed 12.7 tonnes of top Pinot Noir grapes in Elton Vineyard in 2013 – equating to 826 cases of wine, worth $413,780.24.

The lawsuit claims the damage was caused by herbicide spraying without ‘reasonable care’ on neighbouring Five Cent Farm by Jeffrey Nichols. The farm could not be reached by Decanter.com, but was reported to contesting the claim and denies wrongdoing.

• See also: France to tighten rules on vineyard pesticide spraying

A official Department of Agriculture report previously concluded that, while Nichols was likely to have been the source of the damage, it could not be absolutely certain that this was the case.

‘We will know better at the end of this harvest how the vines have recovered,’ WVV founder Jim Bernau told Decanter.com.

‘It is our hope that the attention given this issue will result in more careful use of these dangerous chemicals, both on crops and in our environment generally.’ WVV is seeking up to three times its estimated losses from the incident in compensation.

WVV has leased Elton Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills – which it describes as ‘one of Oregon’s top 10 vineyards’ – from owners the O’Brien family since 2007, using its grapes in the winery’s Estate Pinot Noir, O’Brien Pinot Noir, Signature Cuvée and Elton Pinot Noir.

Earlier this year, WVV announced plans to establish a small-scale winery at Elton Vineyard under the Oregon Estate Vineyards banner, making estate bottlings of the vineyard’s Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Jackson Family Wines is aiming to increase its production of ‘world class’ Pinot Noir with the purchase of a number of vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

‘World class Pinot Noir’… Zena Crown

The acquisition of the Zena West vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA comes after the California producer bought the adjoining Zena East and Zena Middle parcels in March this year.

The deals represent the first time the company, producer of the Kendall-Jackson and La Crema labels, has bought land in the US outside California.

The three blocks, collectively known as the Zena Crown vineyard, comprise 83 acres (34ha) of vineyards, planted to five clones of Pinot Noir.

Previously managed by Premier Pacific Vineyards, Zena Crown has supplied fruit for wines from Penner-Ash Wine Cellars, Expression and Kudos, as well as Jackson Family Wines.

Company chairman Barbara Banke, widow of founder Jess Jackson, said she expected Zena Crown to produce ‘world class’ Pinot Noir in future.

Jackson Family Wines has also bought Gran Moraine, a hillside vineyard in the Yamhill-Carlton district, which includes 200 acres (80ha) of vineyards and was also previously managed by Premier Pacific Vineyards.

The March deal also included the as yet unplanted, 350-acre (140ha) Maple Grove vineyard, further south near the city of Dallas, Polk County.

Written by Richard Woodard

Oregon 2005: Keep

Producers in the Willamette Valley say this vintage will be a return to finesse and elegance

3/5

Weather Conditions

After recent vintages that brought warmer weather, early ripeness and higher alcohol, this year’s Oregon wine harvest occurred later than most expected, resulting in cooler temperatures that many winemakers throughout the state say will lead to lower alcohol levels, structured acidity and ideal flavour development.

After one of the driest winters and wettest springs on record in Oregon, the growing season carried on with a warm—not hot—growing season and chilly autumn. Pinot noir producers in the Willamette Valley say this vintage will be a return to finesse and elegance, which has long characterized classic Oregon Pinot noir.

Autumn rains, particularly in the Willamette Valley where Pinot Noir plays the prominent role, were a defining factor of the vintage. In the southern part of the Willamette Valley, some vineyards were able to finish picking before the major rains set in.

Best Appellations

Willamette Valley

Best Producers

Quick Links Travel Guide Oregon US | Oregon Pinot Noir: Expert’s Choice

Oregon 2002: Keep

A particularly good year for Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley—ripe and fruity with balancing acidity

4/5

Weather Conditions

Winter and spring were unusually dry in Oregon resulting in 10-15 inches less than normal rainfall. However, there were no problems during bloom and set, and throughout most of the summer the routine was one of warm days and cool nights. A high pressure pattern which kept rains far off shore also allowed daily temperatures ranging between 40-80o F. In early September, some shriveling of the fruit was observed, causing a few growers to harvest early. Those who waited for rain to perk up the grapes were rewarded when light rains were followed by dry cool weather. Those harvesting in mid to late October produced the better balanced, riper wines. For many, the harvest stretched out over 4-5 weeks.

Best Appellations

Consistent throughout the entire Willamette Valley, also a good vintage in the Rogue Valley

Best Producers

Domaine Serene, Domaine Drouhin, Ken Wright Cellars, Argyle, Ponzi, Sokol Blosser, Torii Mor, Brick House, Elk Cove, Chehalem

Quick Links Travel Guide Oregon US | Oregon Pinot Noir: Expert’s Choice