Peace in the valley

In Oregon's Willamette region, the wine is the natural product of listening to the land

The wine tells you all you need to know. Oregon pinot noir's distinctive characteristics – burnt rose in color, with subtle berry flavors and a seductive, velvety feeling in the mouth – are aesthetic trademarks known throughout the world.

Everything about the wine plays dramatically different than its brooding, thicker Northern California pinot relatives, and purposely so.

The Oregon wine country, centered in the scenic Willamette Valley, also presents a vastly different experience from the Northern California region. Just 35 minutes to southwest of Portland, there are stunning vistas lined with green or golden vines backed by thrusting tree lines and muted skies. The winery tasting rooms are often beautifully built structures made not only for efficient tasting but studied reflection.

The Oregon wine experience, for those who visit and those who live there, deals as much with lifestyle choices as it does with taste preferences. It also concerns a reverence for characteristics of the land, the actual soil and terrain, ideas once marginally esoteric but now widely held and stringently enacted.

Harve Ballard, a lifelong Oregonian, personifies many of the wine-industry professionals working there. Five years ago he was an upper-level manager for a high-tech company; now he manages the winery for the highly regard Cuneo Cellars in Carlton.

"The livability here has more to do with than just the wine country and the ability to grow pinot noir," Ballard said.

"It's the environment. We're an hour drive to the mountains, an hour drive to the coast. Here in the Willamette Valley, you've got it all."

Highway 99W, which angles southwest out of Portland into the Chehalem Mountains, leads to the towns of Newberg and Dundee and the center of the Oregon wine country. At Newberg you can head west on Highway 240 through the sloping farmlands to Yamhill and Carlton.

Here there are such essential stops as the Carlton Winemakers Studio, the first LEED registered "green" winery where several winemakers present their products in a cooperative environment.

Similarly, the Tasting Room in Carlton offers a wide-ranging selection of wines from small boutique wineries that don't maintain their own tasting rooms.

All of it carries a certain sense of natural, unforced personality, which seems to be the Oregon way. Most Oregon winemakers want the primary influence on their winemaking to come from the land and not the winemakers' idea of what the wine should taste like.

"It's about doing what does naturally well here. Letting it express itself and letting it grow naturally to express the place it comes from," said Pat Dudley of Bethel Heights Winery in the lower Willamette Valley.

"Certainly that would express the aesthetic of most of the winemakers of the Willamette Valley. It's a unique place, and grapes that are grown here make unique wine."

The Oregon Wine Board reported that in 2007 the Oregon wine industry as a whole produced and crushed a record amount of grapes for the third year in a row. The state's wine industry planted a record amount of new acres for the second year year in a row. Oregon's 370 wineries produced wine under 442 labels and sold 1.7 million cases of wine for $207.8 million.

That is dwarfed by California's 2,687 bonded wineries selling 192 million cases in 2007 for $18.9 billion in retail sales – and Oregon is pretty much OK with that.

Winemaking in the Willamette Valley was still known as "the great adventure" when Dudley and her family arrived in 1977 and established the Bethel Heights Winery. Dudley, with husband Ted Casteel, his twin brother, Terry, and Terry's wife, Marilyn Webb, bought 50 acres of land in the Eola Hills region of the southern Willamette Valley northwest of Salem.

"We had determined, the four of us together, as a family vacation-lark idea, to do a lot of wine-tasting for fun," Dudley said from her winery office, where she is president and chief marketing officer for Bethel Heights.

The vacation experience ultimately changed their lives. The four decided they would detour from careers they had spent a great deal of time and energy preparing for and "go make wine somewhere."

That turned out to be the Willamette Valley, which was still under the radar as an agricultural region.

"It’s so stunning and so diverse here. It’s not wall-to-wall vineyards – it’s not wall-to-wall anything," Dudley said.

She and her husband, Ted, came down to the University of California, Davis, to study viticulture and gain a sense of how they might move forward. They knew California wasn’t really affordable for them but heard Oregon was both interesting and approachable. Those descriptions would soon become attributes of the wine they made.

"Then we saw an advertisement for this little piece of property, 50 acres, in "Wines and Vines" (a monthly wine and grape industry magazine). We had heard you only needed 25 acres to support a family, and we had two families so we thought, ’What the heck, 50 acres!’ "

They soon brought in Pat Dudley’s sister Barbara and acquired 25 more acres. Bethel Heights now produces notable pinot noir, chardonnay, pinot gris and pinot blanc amounting to approximately 13,000 cases of wine annually.

The vineyards were established in 1977 and the winery in 1984. By that time pinot noir, specifically Oregon pinot noir, had entered the wine world’s consciousness through the foresight and determination of David Lett.

Lett, who died Oct. 9 at his home in Dundee, north of Bethel Heights, is universally acknowledged as the father of Oregon pinot noir with his Eyrie Winery, which he started in 1966. He disregarded advice from his UC Davis professors in determining how the cool Oregon climate would affect the vines and grapes.

In 1979, Lett’s 1975 vintage Eyrie Reserve Pinot Noir was the first American pinot noir to successfully compete against French burgundies at the elite wine competition in Paris, Olympiades of the Wines of the World. The following year, Lett’s wine came in a startling second by only two-tenths of a point to Joseph Drouhin’s 1959 Chambolle-Musigny. Oregon wine was forever on the map, and Lett’s concepts dominated the region.

Burgundian winemaker Robert Drouhin, who organized the second tasting, was so impressed with the Oregon wine that he purchased land in the Willamette Valley and built Domaine Drouhin Oregon.

Lett’s influence is based in a "gentle touch" sensibility encompassing the complete winemaking process. Lett believed in allowing nature to run its course, not allowing irrigation, herbicides or insecticides in his hand- managed vineyards. Grapes are picked at the crest of maturity to emphasize their varietal characteristics.

Like Lett and the Bethel Heights family, numerous other winemakers had drifted to Oregon, including significant producers such as Dick Erath, Susan and Bill Sokol-Blosser and Dick and Nancy Ponzi. Their wineries now dot the countryside. They form a like-minded group of artisan winemakers who have supported each other while collectively affecting the market place.

"We found that the pioneers in this industry were wonderful collaborative, cooperative people," Pat Dudley said.

"We got help from everybody in figuring out what we were doing so we could get it right the first time."

Despite their growth and success, the commonality of spirit and purpose still binds together the Willamette Valley winemakers.

"People can buy land here for something within reason and farm it in an ordinary, family-owned business kind of a way," Dudley said.

There’s no doubt things have changed in the little towns and country roads in the Willamette Valley, as there is now a thriving bed-and-breakfast business buoyed by travelers seeking the Oregon wine experience.

"The success of pinot noir and the success of the Willamette Valley go hand in hand," Dudley said.

"This valley is perfect for so many things."

Call Bee theater critic Marcus Crowder, (916) 321-1120.