Tracing the fruition of Oregon’s wine industry
In the beginning, the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were bearded young men and overall-wearing women. They were college graduates who had majored in engineering, philosophy, political science or the liberal arts. But they found their life’s work in the hills and farmlands of the Willamette Valley.
The new “Oregon Experience” documentary, “Oregon Wine: Grapes of Place,” tells the story of how the state’s pioneering winemakers were driven to produce wines when there was not yet a market for them. They shared a vision, which was to produce wines in the noblest European tradition, but bearing the specific traits of the Willamette Valley regions where the grapes were grown.
This marriage of old and new worlds was revolutionary. In time, the efforts of the early visionaries and risk-takers made Oregon synonymous with world-class pinot noir, the hard-to-grow grape for which the northern Willamette Valley climate turned out to be ideal.
In “Oregon Wine: Grapes of Place,” producer/writer Nadine Jelsing interviews the founders of the wineries — their hair now gray, or gone — who helped put the Willamette Valley on the wine map: Eyrie, Adelsheim, Sokol Blosser, Erath, Ponzi, among them. She includes taped interviews with David Lett, founder of the Eyrie Vineyards, who died in 2008, and whose passion for pinot noir earned him the nickname, “Papa Pinot.”
Jelsing reminds us that these trailblazers weren’t the first to make wine in Oregon. Peter Britt, the photographer and horticulturist, grew wine grapes in the Rogue Valley in the 1850s. But Prohibition wiped out the wine industry, such as it was. As David Adelsheim says, because of Prohibition, “we’d lost a generation of wine drinkers.”
For years, California was the center of commercial production. Its industry was known for producing jug wines that borrowed names from great wines of Europe —
“Hearty Burgundy,” and chablis — but didn’t observe the classic European standards of winemaking.
The California approach, as those interviewed in the documentary recall, was to plant every kind of grape everywhere. But that was absolutely the wrong way to grow pinot noir, which fared poorly in the hot California sun.
All of the interviewees recall how much of their ultimate success came from working collaboratively and congenially. The early winemakers shared resources and the same goal — to make the best wines possible, without compromise. And while the wines were good, at first nobody wanted to buy them. Who cared about wine from Oregon?
But when Oregon wines began winning national taste tests, influential critics jumped on the bandwagon. By the mid-1980s, word was getting out about Oregon’s wine — especially the pinot noir.
As the documentary says, there are now about 400 wineries in Oregon, and the state ranks fourth in the country in wine production. What began as a handful of dreamers planting grapes grew into an industry.
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