The pioneering spirit of Oregon wine is too good to lose

The modern wine industry in Oregon owes its existence to the fact that its founders saw the state as “Not California”. Many had worked in the California wine industry and were seeking somewhere a bit cooler, at least in climatological terms, that might prove welcoming to the red burgundy grape Pinot Noir. David Lett of Eyrie, who first planted vines in 1965 and was the earliest Oregon vintner to achieve international acclaim, was known as Papa Pinot.

The first wine producers here — among them Adelsheim, Amity, Knudsen Erath, Maresh, Ponzi, Sokol Blosser and Tualatin — saw themselves uniting to establish grape growing that was refreshingly free of California glitz. There was a sort of wholemeal, hippie element to it all, as well as a community spirit whereby pioneering vintners would share both winemaking secrets and equipment.

That spirit is still alive in the state, especially in the Willamette Valley just south of Portland, the heartland of Oregon wine production. In this green, undulating farm country, everyone knows everyone else. Marcus Goodfellow makes his wine in a warehouse on the outskirts of McMinnville that constitutes Goodfellow Family Cellars. He transitioned from being a sommelier in Portland to being a producer thanks to the help he got from vintners such as Steve Doerner at Cristom Vineyards near Salem, who was part of the second wave in the valley. “The community here is amazing,” Goodfellow said, as I tasted his remarkably Burgundian Chardonnay. “You all share and you all gain. It’s that that’s moved the industry forward faster than it would otherwise have done.”

I met Mike Etzel, whose Beaux Frères winery was bought by the champagne house Henriot six years ago, in the beautifully restored barn complex next door to which he now operates. “The beauty of our profession is that we’re more like colleagues than competitors,” he told me. Etzel Farm now provides winemaking space and equipment to several aspiring winemakers, as well as his own Sequitur wines. One of his clients is the much-admired Chardonnay specialist Seth Morgen Long. “I love this facility and how I fit into it,” Morgen Long said, as we sat by a wood fire in the tasting room.

He is one of several young wine producers who enjoyed five years in an exceptional winemaking community at Lingua Franca, the wine operation close to Cristom, started by ex-sommelier Larry Stone. Andrew Reichers of Audeant, whose first harvest was in 2016, is another. “The mantra of Oregon is share and share alike,” he said. “We introduce each other to our distributors as well as talking all things winemaking. The ethos is that we drink a lot of the same wines together, and have dangerously similar ideas.”

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In April 2022, after wildfires virtually wiped out the 2020 crop, Lingua Franca was sold to Constellation Brands of California, one of the world’s biggest wine companies — very un-Oregon. One of the first things Constellation did, intending to scale up Lingua Franca’s output, was to serve notice on the rabble of young winemakers taking up space in their winery. I asked Reichers whether it was a shock to be moved out. “It was a good five-year run,” he said. “And they gave us plenty of time to find a landing spot.

The real shock was how much I’d got used to that community and enjoyed the social aspect of it — iron sharpens iron. I hadn’t necessarily registered that effect on my own winemaking. We had a lot of fun and I have a lot of gratitude towards Larry. He was the oldest person there, and there was no reason for him to ever stop and have a half-hour conversation with me in the cellar. He couldn’t have been more generous with his time, knowledge — and wine collection.”

Reichers now makes his wines in Archer winery on Parrett Mountain, closer to Portland. There are now more than 1,000 licensed wine producers in Oregon, 768 of them in Willamette Valley; three-quarters produce fewer than 3,000 cases of wine a year. The number of physical wineries must be a small fraction of the total number of producers, with so many of them operating out of a corner of someone else’s building in one of the thriving, shared custom crush facilities.

Compare and contrast grape prices to California. In Napa Valley last year, one lot of Cabernet grapes was sold for $65,000 a ton. The average price of Willamette Valley Pinot grapes is $2,900 a ton, with $4,000 being a top price from the renowned Shea vineyard. In Oregon it is still possible for an ambitious aspiring winemaker to buy some grapes and the odd barrel, and persuade a friendly winery owner to let them practise the art of winemaking in a corner of their cellar. They’ll probably give free advice too.

There has been extraordinarily rapid expansion. Admired vintners such as John Thomas of Thomas and Doug Tunnell of Brick House used to grow vines in splendid isolation in the Dundee Hills and Ribbon Ridge appellations respectively. Today they’re surrounded by other vineyards, many of them extremely young and some owned by people who live elsewhere. French interest from the likes of Drouhin, Méo-Camuzet, Jadot and more recently Bollinger, who bought Ponzi in 2021, has generally been seen as benign. The Rothchilds of Ch Lafite have been sniffing around; such interest from a Bordeaux first growth will presumably be viewed as a compliment. Through acquisition, Beaux Frères is now a sister company to Ch Latour.

There was some consternation a decade ago when Jackson Family Wines (JFW), which owns 28 California wineries, rapidly acquired Gran Moraine, Penner-Ash, WillaKenzie and Zena Crown in the Willamette Valley. But Jackson seems to have earned the respect of the local community, not least by appointing the right people, notably Eugenia Keegan, a partner of old-timer David Adelsheim and a winemaker herself, to oversee their Oregon empire.

I asked Adam Campbell, whose parents established Elk Cove in 1974 and who took over from them in 1997 when there were only 125 wine producers in the valley, whether the spirit of Oregon wine had lived on. Despite the arrival of Constellation and last year’s acquisition of Oregon’s A to Z Wineworks by Ste Michelle Wine Estates, which reports to a New York-based private equity firm, he was sanguine.

“Almost without exception the people who come here come for a reason and quickly buy into the ethos of the area,” he said. “There are a few people buying fruit or wine here who don’t get it because they’re not based here. But JFW get it. It’s mostly about having an open door and talking about winemaking and vineyards. I’d really miss it if we couldn’t have those conversations.”

Some old-timers worry whether this will remain the case, given the big operators now moving into Oregon. It’s an open question.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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