Willamette Valley rising stars: eight names to know

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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