Yamhill-Carlton: An oasis for Pinot Noir in the wilds of Oregon

The sub-appellation of Yamhill-Carlton is positioned due west of the much smaller Ribbon Ridge, and rather more famous Dundee Hills AVA.

Just like the Dundee Hills, which was carved out of the Oregon wilderness by David Lett in 1965, Yamhill-Carlton is another pioneering AVA, its potential recognised by Pat and Joe Campbell who established the first vineyards for their Elk Cove winery in 1974.

It was officially recognised as an AVA in 2004.

Known for their structure, the wines of Yamhill-Carlton bear the hallmark of dark fruits and spice, and their tannin makes them reliably age-worthy.

A founding amid farmland

‘Yamhill-Carlton was much more remote back then,’ says second-generation Anna Campbell, who runs the winery with her brother Adam.

‘It had a much smaller population that felt very distant from the big cities of McMinnville and Portland. There were more dairy and cattle farms back then and lots of plum and cherry orchards.’

‘My folks fell in love with the property that would become Elk Cove,’ Campbell continues, ‘with its protective bowl shape and giant fir and oak trees. There was a little dilapidated barn and some overgrown orchards, and they had a vision of turning it into a vineyard, selling a little wine out of the old barn and living off the land.

'The local herd of elk migrated through and bedded down around our family’s trailer one morning, inspiring the name Elk Cove.’

‘They recognised they couldn’t do it all themselves,’ Campbell recounts. ‘Despite their isolation and independent spirit, they teamed up with their colleagues in this new industry and worked together to improve their winemaking, to lobby the state for better land-use and labelling laws, to market their wines together.

'They built a community along with other pioneers like David Lett and David Adelsheim, the Ponzis, and the Sokol-Blossers, and we are all still benefitting from that sense of shared vision.’

‘We still hear that Oregon has something exceptional because the wineries work together,’ she continues. ‘They don’t see themselves so much as competition but as collaborators. Believing that a rising tide lifts all boats.

'We still benefit from this culture. Every time a skilled winemaker or viticulturalist chooses to stay in Oregon, they cite that it’s because it doesn’t feel as cutthroat or as isolated as other wine regions.’

A unique soil profile

The Yamhill-Carlton AVA is an island of sorts, surrounded by the signature soil of the Willamette Valley, rich, red Jory, volcanic in origin.

‘Those soils are radically different than the soil that defines the Yamhill-Carlton,’ says Lemelson Vineyards winemaker Matt Wengel.

The soil he is referring to is Willakenzie, an ancient marine sedimentary soil that is much drier than Jory and that is pre-eminent in Yamhill-Carlton.

‘But it’s incredibly diverse,’ Wengel continues. ‘We think of the Yamhill-Carlton in terms of Willakenzie. As soon as you get past that 400-and-some-odd feet in elevation, the soil transitions to Jory, an incredibly fertile basalt high in iron. Given the region’s low elevation, many people aren’t even aware of this nuance.’

Wengel adds: ‘The big challenge of Yamhill-Carlton with these Willakenzie soils is that they are sandy, very fine, and most importantly, deep.

'That means from a winemaking and viticulture point of view that these soils stress the vine, and that’s a perfect thing for the quality of the resulting wine.’

Climatic nuance

Given the narrow nature of the Willamette Valley and the fact that it’s easy to pass from one AVA to another in just a few minutes of driving, it’s easy to assume that the climate can be homogenous throughout the Willamette. P

lenty of dynamism exists across the Valley’s 1.4 million hectares, let alone the 1,150 hectares of vines in the Yamhill-Carlton appellation.

‘We talk a lot about the sedimentary soils, but I don’t think nearly enough about some of the other unique conditions here,’ says Gran Moraine winemaker Shane Moore.

To hear Moore tell it, there is a distinct difference between wines from the east and west sides of Yamhill Carlton, a region more or less divided by Highway 47.

‘There are the wines coming from the western side of the appellation,’ explains Moore.

‘Those would include Résonance, Gran Moraine and Elk Cove and all those, and then there are the wines on the east side, like Ken Wright, Lemelson and others. From my tasting, it seems like the two sides of the Yamhill-Carlton are very different in structure.’

He continues: ‘On the eastern side, I see more tannin and a kind of darker fruit profile. Those from the western side seem to have softer tannin profiles. We see a lot less wind on the west side.’

Concluding, Moore says: ‘I think that’s a lot of it; the wind really affects the thickness of the skins. Those western vineyard sites are really tucked right up against the Coast Range, and so it’s not nearly as open a valley.

‘And there’s a little bit more of a rain shadow as well. It’s just the vines are a little more protected. They seem prettier and more elegant, and the wines on the eastern side seem more structured and have more depth.’

Seven Yamhill-Carlton producers to watch

Elk Cove Vineyards

Elk Cove is the AVA’s founding property, established in 1974. The story goes that the Campbell family winds their way up a gravel road to an abandoned and overgrown homestead in the foothills of the Coast Range Mountains. It was love at first sight, and Pat and Joe Campbell set down roots.

Their son, Adam, is now responsible for making the Elk Cove wines. The estate has grown to six vineyard sites with 380 planted acres (150ha).

Elk Cove farms sites in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range at various elevations. Their winery estate vineyard has grown from the original five acres planted in 1974 and sits at over 750ft in elevation (230 metres).

Their most prestigious bottling is often the single-vineyard Roosevelt Pinot Noir; the steep, south-facing slopes drive ripeness in the fruit from vintage to vintage.

Gran Moraine

Gran Moraine is a Jackson Family project in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. It is a gorgeous vineyard site on rolling slopes tucked into the foothills of the Cascade Range in the western Yamhill-Carlton district. The winemaker, Shane Moore, is an exuberant character dedicated to picking early to preserve freshness.

‘The Pinots have a lot of that gravelly texture on the palate,’ says Moore. ‘I think of it as a linear, sort of mid-palate travel. That’s the through line of the appellation, in my opinion, and there are a lot of style differences between sites and winemakers.’

‘So generally, in a lot of years, the two earliest picks in the whole Willamette Valley are us and a winery with a very warm, south-facing Dundee Hills site. I’ve been doing it for 20 years now, but my mentors were all about hanging fruit out.

‘And going as far as you can with ripeness, and that was kind of where that quality line was, and I’ve always had the thought that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And so we’re pulling in quite a bit earlier than most places.’

Kramer Vineyards

Kramer Vineyards is an under-the-radar family operation in the northwestern reaches of the Yamhill-Carlton appellation, just above Gaston. With notoriously a steep vineyard site, the Kramers were part of an early second wave of wine growing and winemaking families coming to the Willamette Valley.

Keith and Trudy Kramer planted their vineyard in 1984 to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling, producing their first wines commercially in 1988.

Now, second-generation winemaker Kimberly Kramer makes the wines and the vines have matured, resulting in dynamic Pinot Noir, with intense fruit character and delicious earth and forest floor signatures.

Ken Wright Cellars

Kentucky transplant by way of UC Davis and California’s Monterey County, Ken Wright is a long-standing fixture in the Willamette Valley, often referred to as the Mayor of Carlton. Wright’s arrival in the late 1980s saw him found Panther Creek Cellars before starting his eponymous brand in 1994.

Wright authored the Yamhill-Carlton AVA application in the early 2000s. (It was established in 2004.)

Wright’s focus is on single-vineyard designate Pinot Noirs, and he makes wines from 13 different vineyard sites throughout the Willamette Valley.

Lemelson Vineyards

Established by environmental attorney and activist Eric Lemelson in 1999, Lemelson Vineyards. (Interestingly Eric’s father Jerome Lemelson was a prolific inventor, and holds more patents than any other inventor, except a guy named Thomas Edison.)

Lemelson Vineyards has been organic since its inception, and the vineyard team, led by Rob Schultz get all the credit from the Lemelson director of winemaking Matt Wengel.

‘Rob [Schultz] has a very scientific mind, and his approach to managing our vineyards, starting in 2021 and 2022, has really made a difference in our wines, says Wengel. Though the soils are a defining factor of how those vines perform.

‘Yamhill-Carlton is probably my favourite Willamette appellation when it comes to vineyards with age and deeper root systems,’ Wengel continues.

‘Once you have mature plants, the AVA, in contrast with the Dundee Hills and the Chehalem Mountains, which are higher elevation, volcanic Jory soils, here, the wines are more structured. So it’s a firmer tannin backbone, and for someone like me coming from Napa, I enjoy making bolder wines.’

He adds: ‘We do an extended maceration with all our wines and 16 months of elévage. It’s really important for these wines and the tannins to evolve. You see a transition to black fruits, black cherry, and blackberry. There is a feral element, and the signature we all talk about up here with the Yamhill-Carlton is the earthiness and spice.’

Résonance

Résonance is the first-ever project by Burgundian icons Maison Louis Jadot outside of Burgundy. They purchased the property in 2013, and the 20 acres (8ha) of vines were planted in 1981 on their own rootstock. To date, there have been no signs of phylloxera in the vineyard.

The famed Jacques Lardière spearheaded the project, but Guillaume Large is leading the Oregon winemaking team and like Wengel at Lemelson is a big believer in vine age making a difference in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA.

‘We see a lot of vine stress in our younger plantings here,’ explains Large, ‘but at Résonance, the vines are now over 40 years-old, and they have access to the basaltic bedrock, and so we have such great resilience in our vineyard. We saw no stress in the vines when it was hot in 2022 and 2023.’

‘I can’t tell you precisely the difference between grafted and ungrafted vines because I am still learning,’ Large explains. ‘Yet I am sure that ungrafted vines show a pure and true expression of this terroir, this place, with a true sense of clarity.’

Soter Vineyards

After leaving his indelible mark on Napa Valley and California, Oregon native Tony Soter came north to Oregon with his late wife Michelle, establishing Soter Vineyards in 1997 at Mineral Springs Ranch.

In 2013, their entire property was converted to biodynamics, and they achieved certification in 2016. In addition to their Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, they have established a reputation for their elegant sparkling wines.

Chris Fladwood is the winemaker at Soter Vineyards, and sees the Mineral Springs Ranch property as an outlier from a geological point of view.  

‘So Mineral Springs is a bit of an outlier in the Yamhill-Carlton,’ he explains. ‘We’re actually over sandstone and not siltstone. The traditional Willakenzie soil is over siltstone. And silt being a finer particle than sand will hold on to the water a little bit longer.’

‘In our vineyards, this means the vines use up their water. It’s gonna transition from sort of a vegetative concentration into flowering a little bit earlier, and this gives you more potential for a tannin structure, and as a result, you’re going to see longer evolution in our Pinot Noirs,’ Fladwood concludes.

Pinot Noir from Yamhill-Carlton:

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