Rising Number of Oregon Wineries Ferment Success and Fame

Tucked away among forested hillsides just beyond Portland’s suburbia, Oregon wineries are beginning to get the world’s attention.

In the 35 years since the first growers to brave the Willamette Valley’s mud discovered that it is an ideal place to grow pinot noir, about 120 wineries have set down roots.

Last year, $90 million worth of Oregon wine was sold, as far away as Europe, Japan and Australia. A 1994 pinot noir from Ponzi Vineyards was served last month at the White House state dinner for Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

Half a million tourists tramped through Oregon wine country last year, spending $25 million along the way.

Forty of the wineries are southwest of Portland in Yamhill County, Oregon’s more scenic equivalent of the Napa Valley.

“We have requests literally from people all over the country,” said Sue Horstmann, executive director of the Yamhill County Wineries Assn. “Nobody has any wine left; they’re selling all their wine.”

Growers are scattered through the rest of the Willamette Valley, the Umpqua and Rogue valleys in southwestern Oregon, and the Columbia Valley and Walla Walla regions in northeastern Oregon and across the state line into Washington.

Pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot gris account for most of the acreage, although 21 varietals are grown in the state.

Oregon wine’s reputation was cemented the same way as California’s: in Paris. The Eyrie Vineyards’ 1975 pinot noir placed third among 330 wines of the world at a tasting sponsored by a French magazine in 1979.

The following year, Burgundy winemaker Robert Drouhin assembled 20 experts to judge the top six “foreign” wines again, this time against some of the finest Burgundies from his cellars. Eyrie’s ’75 pinot noir came in second, two-tenths of a point behind a ’59 Drouhin.

Drouhin was won over. He established Domaine Drouhin Oregon in Yamhill County in 1987.

Now the International Pinot Noir celebration is held in McMinnville, the county seat. Oregon wines consistently place in the top 10 in international competitions.

Rick Eadie, a wine consultant from Westport, Conn., has come to Chateau Benoit’s tasting room atop a panoramic hill in Yamhill County as part of a fact-finding mission to Oregon wine country.

After a couple days of tasting, does he think Oregon wines stack up?

“They do and they will continue to get better. When you have vintages like ‘96, ’94 and ‘89, they do more than stack up,” Eadie said.

It was back in the early ‘60s when David Lett, fresh out of viticulture school at UC Davis, began searching the country for a climate similar to that of Burgundy, so that he could make the dry red wine known as pinot noir. The Willamette Valley, with its moderate summers and marine breezes, kept showing up in his calculations.

Lett set up shop in a former turkey-processing plant in McMinnville and established the Eyrie Vineyards on four acres--including the first pinot gris ever produced in the United States. He sold college textbooks to make ends meet.

Now Eyrie has 49 producing acres, and Lett’s son Jason, 28, a microbiology researcher at the University of New Mexico, is poised to join the family business.

“There are so many facets of it that I think it would just be intellectually a really amazing way to spend your life,” he said.

This year, early fall rains swelled the state’s grape harvest to 17,400 tons at a total price of about $18.6 million, up from a record 15,000 tons and $15.3 million last year. Some winemakers ran out of room in their barrels and had to turn away growers.

“I have some very nice lots downstairs, I have some very interesting lots, I have some challenging lots,” said Lynn Penner-Ash, the award-winning winemaker at Rex Hill Vineyards.

When Penner-Ash was recruited from the Napa Valley in 1988, she had not made a drop of pinot noir. But she likes the challenge of the sensitive grape, and she likes the more laid-back aura of Oregon wine country.

“Up here this industry is more family-oriented, it’s friendlier, it’s less intense,” Penner-Ash said.

Oregon’s wine industry still is in its infancy compared to California, where about 700 wineries sold $5.2 billion in wine last year.

Penner-Ash and others hope that Oregon’s wine industry does not become “Napa-fied.”

In Napa, “it seems that every other driveway is a driveway to a winery,” said Christine Pascal, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Wine Advisory Board. “Here, you can see the vineyard where the grapes are grown.”

At JNF Vineyard, with its stunning view of Mt. Hood and seven acres of Riesling vines, Josef and Gisela Fennerl are trying to be retired.

But with a car-repair business on the side and a continuing battle with grape-loving birds, the couple is as busy as ever.

When the Fennerls began growing wine grapes seven years ago, no one wanted to buy them.

“Now they call me,” Fennerl said.

Pascal said Oregon winemakers, in general, have chosen quality over quantity.

“We’re never going to have tons and tons of volume. . . . We’ve been able to really keep a lot of the practices and the idealism and we’ve been able to keep it while we’ve been able to compete,” she said. “Oregon will still be the place to go to do it your way.”