In the year 2000, Oregon was one of the last places in the United States that an individual could follow a dream of becoming an independent wine producer. I'm not talking about a wealthy person following an urge to become a gentleman farmer. No, I am talking about a person who eats, drinks and breathes wine and especially Pinot Noir. This is the kind of person who on Wednesday is still thinking about the Pinot they had on Saturday evening. It is the type of person who operates on very little margin of error because he's not using play money and who knows that error will occur and you have to find a way to deal with it. Too much error and this Oregon wine dream will go away.
It is an incredible place, the Northern Willamette Valley in Oregon. A lot has changed since 2000, land is more expensive, the price of steel wire and posts for trellacing has risen sharply and the A sites are harder to come by. Maybe, even in Oregon, the ship has sailed for an ordinary person to fulfill the dream of becoming and independent wine producer. But there are few places in the world that are condusive to Pinot Noir and this is undeniably one of them. There are also few places in the world where handcrafted wines, real handcrafted wines are alive, are actually thriving. There is no red variety in the United States that is as much an expression of terroir as is Pinot Noir and few wines as intimately connected with the people who produce them as Pinot is in Oregon. That is the beauty of Pinot Noir, it just doesn't lend itself to mass production in the vineyard or in the winery. Most producers have intimate contact with the vineyard and the wine it produces. There is no other place, no other variety I would rather grow than Pinot Noir.
Well, I am going romantic on you and I am the last person to be romantic about this business. If you follow this blog you will learn how difficult it is to grow Pinot Noir in Oregon, especially when you can't afford to fail. Lenne Estate started in 2000.
Armed with some seed money inherited from my father in law, my wife and I set out to follow this dream. Okay, it was more my dream than hers, but she liked the way vineyards looked, was silly enough to believe that I could write an accurate business plan for a vineyard(the expenses were accurate, but mother nature seemed determined to side track every revenue projection I made) and off we went searching for property. We started in the spring of 2000 slogging through rain soaked Yamhill county looking for the right site. The sites that had potential, meaning they had the right soil, orientation and elevation were covered in timber, blackberry brambles or had the kind of terrain that would be a nightmare to plant. The sites that were easy, sites that you could move right in and lay it out, were just B sites. Those sites might produce great wine in a great year, but never consistently.
More than a little frustration set in, but finally in April of 2000 the weather broke in Yamhill County and we saw the sun for the first time in a couple of months. My partner, Scott Huffman, now the winemaker at Anne Amie, told me about a site he had evaluated for the new owner of Chateau Benoit(later to become Anne Amie). The site wasn't really on the market yet, but he had heard about it from the husband of a co-worker who knew the owners. Fortunately the owner of Anne Amie passed on the site and armed with a soil map, elevations and a compass, my wife and I walked up a hill into a pasture on a warm Sunday in April.
I knew before I ever saw the site that the soil and the elevation were perfect. When we walked through a gate and up into that steep hillside pasture, I pulled out my compass and confirmed the orientation and I knew we hadn't seen a site in the last three months that was even close. And I liked the neigborhood with Willakenzie Estate a stone's throw to the west, Tony Sotter's place down the road to the north, Deux Vert right below and Shea Vineyard a couple miles to the east. But, it wasn't until I looked over, seeing the sun shine off my wife's face, the smile in her eyes looking west at the stunning view, that I knew we were home, that this was the place, this was Lenné.
To this day, I have no idea why the owner of Anne Amie passed on the site. I guess sometimes you just get lucky or sometimes wine people just see things with different eyes. I knew the site had the potential to make world-class Pinot Noir. What I didn't know then was how difficult a site it would be to farm, how unyielding it would be at times, how it would test me and continue to test me. All the stress, the difficult times, they were all forgotten just for a moment in the winter of 2005 when I tasted the first barrel sample of the 2004 Pinot Noir. I was glad then that I had the right eyes.
I hope you will follow this blog as I tell you a bit about the early days of laying out and farming Lenné Estate and about what we are up to now, approaching our first release of the 2004 Pinot Noir in the Spring of 2006. And I will talk about Oregon wine in general, mostly about wines from the Northern Willamette Valley, but even give you some thoughts on wine from southern Oregon.
I've just run into your blog, and added it to my comprehensive list of winery blogs:
http://www.winerywebsitereport.com/blogs.html
Posted by: Mike Duffy | April 28, 2009 at 10:11 PM