John Szabo’s Willamette Valley Pinot Feature
Defining the Willamette Valley: Pinot Noir
Text and photos by John Szabo, MS
John Szabo, MS
“Drink Pinot, think Oregon” says the bold-faced tag line on the Willamette Valley Winegrowers Association homepage. “We are Pinot Noir”. The claim is bold indeed, but the numbers speak for themselves. Pinot noir may not be the Willamette, but the Willamette is unquestionably pinot noir.
No other new world wine region is so unswervingly dedicated to a single red grape. With barely a generation and a half in the bottle, fully three-quarters of the valley’s plantings – 14,417 acres – lie under pinot noir vines, accounting for 82% of the Beaver State’s total pinot production. And with a history stretching back to the pioneering plantings of David Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards in the Dundee Hills in 1966 (he planted pinot a year earlier in Corvallis), the Willamette’s history is inexorably linked to pinot noir. And what was once a lonely whisper in the Pacific Northwest has grown to a roaring oratory, with a captive audience from coast to coast. You’ll hear, of course, of Willamette pinot gris, and increasingly of chardonnay, along with a handful of other worthy varieties, but they are the extras on pinot noir’s stage.
2nd generation rational artist Jason Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards
Yet the supremacy of one variety on its own wouldn’t make for such a compelling performance, if it weren’t for the Willamette Valley’s staggeringly complex geology. Within a relatively small area, some 150 kms long by 100 kms wide (and considerably more compact if one considers just the northern Willamette, north of Salem, where most of the action is, including all six sub-AVAs), a mightily impressive range of soil types resulted from a textbook-filling history of active geology.
Soil obsessed Ken Wright, Ken Wright Cellars
Over just the last 50 million years, tectonic plate subduction, crumpling and continental scraping, uplifting and accretion of marine sediments, eruptive volcanic arcs and hotspots, cataclysmic flood cycles of basalt and later water, and more mundane subsequent shaping through wind and water erosion, and fluvial and colluvial bustle, have all contributed to the richly varied patch-work of Willamette soils.
These soils fall into three main categories: 1) volcanic (with sub-classifications called Jory, a deep, clay-rich red soil derived from heavily weathered basalt, and Nekiah, a shallower variant with only a couple of feet of clay before hitting basalt bedrock; 2) marine sedimentary (the main type of which is called Willakenzie, free-draining and sandy); and 3) loess (called Laurelwood), a light soil type composed of wind-blown flood sediments blown down the Columbia Gorge lying over hardened basalts.
Pioneer David Adelsheim (R) with winemaker Dave Page
And this is what I find most fascinating about the Willamette: the dedication to one variety, which also happens to attract the sort of winemaker who, like a well-trained restaurant server, aims only to deliver the goods without ever being seen or heard, and the variations in soil, laid bare by these winemakers. There are of course many places that produce excellent pinot noir. But I can think of no other where the underpinnings of vineyards are so starkly different within such a small area, with only minor variations in climate. The result is an impressive array of soil-derived portraits of pinot noir, of nuanced notes, and chords. And with no fewer than 531 wineries currently in on the performance, it’s quite a show.
The enlightened Josh Bergström of Bergström Wines
Lining Up Soils & AVAs
On a recent journey to the valley with fellow wine pros and pinot scavengers Véronique Rivest (Soif Wine Bar in Hull and vice world sommelier champion) and Brad Royale (wine director, Canadian Rocky Mountain Resorts and WineAlign judge), ever under the watchful eye of majestic volcanic peak Mt. Hood, and with wintry weather more familiar to a Canadian than an Oregonian, we journeyed to the highest and remotest points of the Valley to learn which soils are found where. We kicked up Willakenzie marine sediments in the Yamhill-Carlton and Ribbon Ridge AVAs, and scraped windblown Laurelwood loess from the eastern ridge of the Chehalem Mountain AVA, facing directly into the gaping Columbia Gorge.
Brad and Veronique at Bergstrom
We dug deep into uniformly deep, Jory volcanic-basalt clays in the Dundee Hills AVA, smoldering red with oxidized iron, and crunched winter grasses covering the rows over thin, Van-Duzer-wind-scraped volcanic Nekia soils in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA, with naked rock flowering on the high ridge crests. But a stop in the westernmost McMinnville AVA was the most categorization-defying, an area where ancient marine sediments and 50 million year-old volcanic ocean floor swirl in a terrifically complex mélange, having been scraped off the pacific plate and added to the western edge of North America, and later crumbled up as the coastal Range of hills formed.
Mt. Hood from Cristom’s Jessie Vineyard, Eola-Amity Hills
So What’s The Differences in the Wines?
The point of the visit, and the fun for us wine lovers looking to tell the story of Willamette pinot, was to make sense of this complexity, and draw some broad strokes around soil and wine styles. Here’s what we’ve found.
Loess
Pinot noir from loess, exemplified by the eastern ridge of the Chehalem Mountain AVA, tends to be a little rounder, softer and suppler, with open-knit texture and lots of sappy fruit, enjoyable early on. Strange as the comparison may seem, I’ve found a similar textural profile in the grüner veltliners of the Danube Valley grown on loess – broader, softer, fruitier – especially when compared to the firmer, tighter, more angular examples grown essentially on hard igneous bedrock (what the Austrian call “primary rock”).
Steve Dorner, Tom Gerrie & Mt. Hood, from Cristom’s Jessie Vineyard, Eola-Amity Hills
Marine Sediment vs. Volcanic
Regarding sedimentary vs. volcanic pinots, I think I summed it up reasonably well in my recent book Volcanic Wines: Salt, Grit and Power:
“The principal differences in wine style observed in Pinot Noir grown on Willakenzie soils and Jory soils are related to water holding capacity. Jory soils [Dundee Hills AVA] are deeper and more clay rich, and thus absorb more water and retain it for longer than the free-draining (sandy) sedimentary soils [mainly Yamhill-Carlton and Ribbon Ridge AVAs]. Given Oregon’s generally dry summers, vines in sedimentary soils often experience drought stress towards the end of the growing season as the soil completely dries out. Grapes thus stressed don’t ripen their polyphenols (tannins) as completely as a vine provided with adequate (not excessive) moisture, and skins tend to become thicker to protect the seeds within. Sugar concentration also increases more quickly, and all things being equal, vines grown on sedimentary soils are harvested up to a week earlier than those on deeper volcanic soils.
The net result is that Willakenzie Pinot Noir often has a deeper colour, darker, black-fruit flavours and more burly tannins. These wines take more time to unfurl. David Autrey of Westry Wine Company describes them as ‘more structured’, while James Cahill of Soter says, ‘it’s pretty easy to see in the glass. They’re darker, denser’.
Form-and-function maestro David Autrey of Westrey
Pinot Noir in volcanic soils, on the other hand, ripens later, and so fruit stays in the vibrant red berry spectrum, usually accompanied by an appealing range of spice, sometimes downright exotic. Tannins tend to be lighter and finer, and acids more pronounced and juicy. ‘Volcanic soils provide a more pleasant, generous root environment for the vines – more moisture, nutrients, etc,’ explains Mark Vlossak, winemaker at St. Innocent Winery. ‘What you see is more red fruit, more heady, engaging perfume.’ The consensus among others on the style of volcanic Pinots is striking, ‘they’re lighter in colour, with more elegance, beauty and finesse, and perfume,’ declares Mo Ayoub of Ayoub Wines. According to Autrey, they’re ‘higher acid, with more red fruit’, while Adam Campbell describes them as having ‘a core of sweet red fruit, like red cherry.’”
The cerebral and intuitive Maggie Harrison of Antica Terra
Naturally, producer influence and minor climate variations have their say in wine style, but this is a good general breakdown of what to expect. The journey, however, is yours to make. Below is a short list of recommended producers to get you started. Use the WineAlign search function to see what’s available at your local LCBO.
I hope you find the journey as fascinating as we do. And if what so many producers in the Valley say is true, that the greatest sites in the Willamette Valley “have probably yet to be discovered”, there will be several more acts to this performance.
John Szabo, MS
The Coastal Range