Willamette Valley: Three must-know producers flying under the radar

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

Related articles

Sonoma County: The 2022 vintage report

Napa Cabernet 2022: Best value wines of the vintage

Oregon vintage report: Tricky Willamette Valley 2022 sticks the landing