Oregon’s best and brightest offer great pinots and chardonnays

Making great wine is not easy but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise in Oregon, following our tasting in early Spring of hundreds of wines. The quality of wine coming out of this Pacific Northwest state, specifically pinot noir and chardonnay, is consistently impressive. Even more impressive – it’s only going to improve. Outside of Burgundy, it’s hard to find a greater source of high quality pinot noir. And chardonnay is now making some inroads too.

I wrote last year about the collaborative approach in the grape-growing and winemaking community here so I wanted to meet more people behind the wines this year. As much as this is a great place to grow wine grapes, the human factor looms large in shaping the quality in the bottle.

My tastings of pinot noir delivered a strong and unified impression of quality, freshness, richness, noble structure and impressive balance. These universal tenets of outstanding wine are alive and well in Oregon. There are so many strong examples from the 2017 vintage in this report. The stylistic spread is very much driven by sub-region, by site and by producer – all the things excellent pinot noir needs.

The 2017 vintage held center stage (comprising more than three-quarters of the wines tasted), and the story of this vintage is one of mitigating the heat and delivering full-flavored wines with freshness. “Trying to slow the vines down and extend the season and get hang time has been a consistent theme for many recent vintages,” says Cristom’s Tom Gerrie. Judging by the quality achieved at Cristom in the 2017 harvest they are navigating the shifting climatic conditions well.

Yields in pinot vineyards were higher than the long term average in 2017 and this helped reduce the effects of the hot weather as did some high altitude smoke, which hazed the sky for much of the growing season, according to wine producers I spoke to. This was the only effect of the smoke as I can report no perceptible smoke taint in any of the wines tasted.

Senior Editor Nick Stock shares a joke with Michael Fay, winemaker at Domaine Serene. Serene produced some polished wines with concentration in both 2015 and 2016.

Oregon 2016 pinot noir delivers structure and power

But the top honors for pinot noir in this report go to a wine from the excellent 2016 vintage, the Antica Terra Pinot Noir Antikythera from Eola-Amity Hills. It delivers a level of structural complexity and tannin texture that really sets it apart. Sheer and layered tannins are delivered in vertical form here. Flavors of fresh cherries and red plums ascend along the palate in striking style while the fruit abates the stony tannins.

Winemaker and proprietor Maggie Harrison’s approach in making this wine is very much centered around the final selection and blending to achieve this complexity. “We take a sample from every single barrel of pinot noir – a total of 164 components in 2016 – and spend three days putting things together and pulling things apart,” she says. “Eventually we find the harmonies that exist in the cellar and make the most beautiful wines we can every year.”

Harrison also bottled a 2016 Antica Terra Pinot Noir Obelin, a wine that is not made every year. It has intense character with a deep and contained feel to the palate. Again, it showcases the potential of Oregon’s 2016 pinot noir vintage. The fruit is intense and has a unique kind of beauty and power.

Obelin 2016 is a pinot that demands time, a hallmark of the best pinots from that vintage. Along those same lines, Domaine Serene showed two excellent 2016 single-vineyard bottlings: the Grace Vineyard and the Abbey Oaks Vineyard. These, along with an exceptional trio of 2016 pinots from Eyrie Vineyards (The Eyrie, Daphne and Roland Green bottlings) all serve as a strong statement of the quality of the 2016 Oregon pinot harvest.

This Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Meunier has a glossy, appealing style with an attractive, poached-strawberry palate and nectarines to close.

High grades for 2017 pinot noir too

I found so many wonderful highlights of 2017 vintage pinot noir in this report. Lange Estate Freedom Hill 2017 and Cristom Jessie Vineyard 2017 are two exemplary 2017s, both achieving a 97-point rating. I rated just below at 96 points the Roy Quartz Acorn and Incline, Domaine Drouhin Zephirine and Edition Limitee, Shea Wine Cellars Shea Vineyard Homer, Bergstrom Le Pré du Col and Lange Estate Temperance Hill.

Nicolas Jay and Penner-Ash also made excellent 2017 pinots. The Nicolas Jay Pinot Noir McMinnville Momtazi 2017 and the Penner-Ash Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Shea Vineyard 2017 both achieved 95-point ratings.

A highlight of this visit to Oregon was a tasting and tour through the vineyards at Beaux Freres and Sequitur with founder Mike Etzel, the brother in-law of retired wine critic Robert Parker. The two sold a majority stake in their Beaux Freres estate in 2017 to French company Maisons & Domaines Henriot. Etzel’s focus is on enhancing the legibility of site character in the wines and he speaks of a greater mission to increase biodiversity for a long-term future. “I like to surround our vineyards with forest,” Etzel says. “So they have their own unique microclimate and really develop their own unique personality.”

Adjacent to the mature vines at Beaux Freres, the recently planted Sequitur is all about fine tuning. “What I did at Sequitur was tighten the plantings up to greater density and plant 17 clones of pinot noir in smaller blocks,” Etzel says. “Sequitur has been farmed biodynamically from day one.”

All the work is perceptible in the quality of the wines of Beaux Freres, Etzel’s newer Sequitur project and the Coattails project too. The vineyards even have their own bees!

The Beaux Frères Pinot Noir The Beaux Frères Vineyard 2017 has a sense of depth, complexity and detail. It is a plush, smoothly rendered pinot with elegance and power. The 2017 Sequitur Pinot Noir is lively and pure, packed with ripe blueberries, plums and fresh violets all wrapped in sleek and focused tannins. The Coattails Sequitur Vineyard Pinot Noir 2017 takes a more plush, modern and mineral stance with concentrated dark plum fruit and smoothly hewn, powerful tannins. All three of these wines scored 96 points.

Wine tanks work quietly at Domaine Serene.

Local talent in Oregon

The next generation of the Etzel family, Jesse Lange at his family’s Lange Estate and Jason Lett are Eyrie Vineyards represent a special kind of local winemaker – home-grown, well-traveled and professionally trained. They are in their prime and more than capable of evolving and refining their wines to even greater heights of quality and drinkability.

Newer players are also in the game. A great discovery for me is 00 Wines from Chris Hermann, the driving force behind this chardonnay-focused project. The wines are exceptional, not just in the context of Oregon, but in the wider scheme of US chardonnay. These are right at the top end of style and quality and simply put, if you really like chardonnay, you really need to taste these wines.

Hermann is joined by a number of other excellent chardonnay producers such as Eyrie Vineyards, Domaine Serene, Bergstrom, Domaine Drouhin, Bethel Heights and Lange Estate (all scoring 94 and above in this report with their chardonnay wines). Oregon has a strong case for being the leading source of complex, vibrant chardonnay in the US alongside Sonoma County. Hermann explains one difference for the 00 project: “We are second-generation Oregon and we want to focus on chardonnay the same way people here have historically focused on pinot noir. The only way to achieve greatness is to focus on one single thing and for us that is chardonnay.”

The Domaine Drouhin estate in the Dundee Hills produced some fine, elegant pinot noir and chardonnay wines.

Winemaker Chad Stock is just as passionate about his Minimus and Origin labels, both aiming to innovate with clever riffs on clones and wines that identify important heritage vineyard parcels. David Moore’s Omero Cellars (also made by Stock) is another standout that comes to mind.

Hundred Suns, established in 2015 by Grant Coulter & Renee Saint-Amour, is a project that similarly uses older vines and prime established vineyard sites. 00 Wines has the same approach with their chardonnay sourcing, delving into mature vineyards while also establishing their own. Tom Caruso and Jess Arnold both quit other jobs for winemaking and headed across the country from New York to Oregon via Sonoma County. Their 2017 Pray Tell gamay noir is a beacon of juicy possibility made in tiny quantities – watch Oregon gamay in the future.

Acclaimed Australian winemaker Peter Dredge has also tapped into Oregon, releasing a rio of 2017 pinots. These add to his range of Tasmanian pinot wines forming a global pinot footprint in two very exciting parts of the world. These new projects are driven by the same focused vision that saw the pioneering generation thrive in Oregon.

It’s a wonderful time to buy wine from Oregon. Many variables influence winemaking here but the most exciting at the moment is the human factor. These winemakers’ excellent wines released this year are testament to that.

– Nick Stock, senior editor

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