Oregon, Oh, Oregon!


• By Allen Dale "Ole" Olson   |   Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 4:44 pm   |     |   Print   |   Permalink

I am not widely traveled in the Willamette Valley, but I was there at the beginning of its wine age and again recently to taste its wines and to experience the astonishing success of this blessed wine region. In the early 1970s I met David Lett at his Eyrie Vineyard where he was pioneering the production of Pinot Noir in Oregon. There were few vineyards in his area back then, and he told me what his professors in the Oenology Department at the University of California, Davis, had predicted. “Frosted out, rained out. Every year,” they prophesied.

I don’t know what the Romans were told in the Rhone and Rhine Valleys when they put in the vines they had brought from south of the Alps, but I suspect they were warned by the locals that the soil wasn’t right. the climate was too wet, or the insects too hostile. However, the Legionnaires persisted, and today we have splendid wines throughout those two river valleys, and their historic endeavors spread across all Gaul for which we  today are eternally grateful. 

We Hoosiers also had doubts about the wisdom of tearing out corn fields and replacing them with wine grapes, but wine production in Indiana is flourishing, and wines from the land of steel and basketball are beginning to take an award from time to time in regional and national competitions. And, as a native Hoosier, I must point out that Indiana was home to the nation’s first commercial winery at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Oregon’s success, however, was more meteoric  with a star “born-over-night” quality to it. In just a couple of decades, producers from Burgundy and Alsace were working with pioneers like Lett, Ponzi, Adelsheim, and Blosser; some, like the Drouhins, bought vineyards and land for vineyards and established their own wineries. As early as 1979, David Lett’s Pinot Noir at a Paris show so impressed Robert Drouhin that the the Drouhins insised on a return match in Beaune. In 1985, a group of New York based retailers and writers tasted blind seventeen different 1983 Pinot Noirs from Oregon and Burgundy. They ranked three Oregon wines ahead of any from Burgundy.  Ever since, the two regions have been linked, with few stylistic differences or quality level distinctions.

During my most recent visit to the Willamette, I was overwhelmed by the many different producers of not only Pinot Noir but also Pinot Gris and how little I knew of any of them. Like the good wines of  Baden in Germany, these fine wines of Oregon seldom get far from home. We see the big names in small quantities in our retail stores, but our distributors are leaving those wines sadly underrepresented in our market place.

In discussions about how fast the wine indstry had found success in Oregon, a common response was, “yes, some of us had heard it couldn’t be done, and I suppose if more of us had known that, we might not have done it.”

Now if only I could arrange for a producer to ship legally his wines directly to Hoosier consumers, I coud call the Oregon story a complete success.

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