One of the major things I’m going to take away from my time in the Willamette Valley is that there are so many variables in wine that can influence style. Even though pinot noir is the king of grapes in Oregon, there is such a wide variety of styles due to site, clone, vintage and winemaking. In one day today I saw such a range of wines that it was hard to believe they all came from the same grape variety.
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| Pinot noir fruit at Domaine Drouhin Oregon |
Filed under Winery Visits
It’s safe to say that wine regions in the USA, much like in Australia, are big. This makes it difficult to categorise a region as having a certain style or characteristic. This is partly because there are differences in approaches to winemaking, but mostly because there are countless micro-climates and differences in appelation and site within a broad region. The size of the region also means you are covering a large distance when you are visiting, and getting from one appointment to another in time can have complications.
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I think that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor richly deserved the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Sideways. Having finished Rex Pickett’s sequel to the novel Sideways, and seeing how poor not only his prose is, but also his proof-reading, I can only imagine how badly written his first book must have been. It’s been interesting to discover what happens to the characters, and it might make an interesting film sequel. It has also proved interesting to read it as I have travelled up the west coast, following almost the same route as Miles and Jack. I have now arrived at the zenith of the novel, and the primary wine region the characters reside in. That region is the Central Otago equivalent of North America; the Willamette Valley. Steve Naughton from Pinot NOW had given me a detailed list of wineries to visit, and over the past few weeks I had contacted most of them, and most had got back to me. Much like the rest of my trip up the coast so far, my timing was a little off as vintage was fast approaching and the much smaller wineries in the Willamette Valley were tentative to set anything up until closer to the date. They were very positive about me visiting, which was a lot more than I had gotten out of some Californian regions.
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What a change, to drive from Ukiah in Northern California into Southern Oregon. Once you get past Redding, California the scenery becomes a lot more dramatic. You start to see a lot denser pine forests and heading up into more mountainous climbs. The highway becomes steeper and more curvy, and before long you see the snow-covered Mount Shasta approaching. And not long after that, you are in Oregon, without any fanfare at all. It’s a pretty long drive from Ukiah to Eugene, so I broke it up by stopping in Medford at the heart of the Rogue Valley.
I called into the second largest winery in the region, named Roxy Ann Winery. Historically the estate was covered in orchards, but was converted to wine grapes just over ten years ago. They are best known for their pinot gris of which they make quite a bit, but I thought the standout in terms of value was the Honour Barn Red. I got the chance to try their pear wine, which was very dangerously easy to drink. The other winery I dropped in on was Del Rio, the largest in the region. Unfortunately owing to the fact I didn’t have a business card “proving” that I worked in the wine industry (something I have since remedied thanks to Staples’ four hour turnaround) I could only try one wine. Both wineries had a Claret, a term that apparently can be used as long as it was before the watershed imposed by the EU.
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| RoxyAnn tasting room |
Filed under Winery Visits
A podcast about wine, wine culture and wine people. Every week a different guest from the wine industry joins host The Intrepid Wino (aka James Scarcebrook) for a casual chat about the world of wine.
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