A guide’s tour of the northern Willamette Valley wine country – the Dundee Hills, Chehalem Mountains and Yamhill-Carlton, the three soils behind the vines, and the pioneer history we share along the way.
An appellation named for its dirt — wind-blown loess over volcanic Jory on the high north slopes of the Chehalem Mountains.
A fossil volcano west of Salem — the valley’s newest AVA, grown on some of its oldest rock and barely touched by the Ice-Age floods.
The one valley AVA defined by weather, not soil — a gap in the Coast Range that funnels ocean wind through the vines and builds structured, ageworthy Pinot.
A warm horseshoe of hills growing the valley’s darkest, longest-lived Pinot Noir — on soils that were once an ocean floor.
Volcanic hills northwest of Salem, cooled every afternoon by ocean wind — the source of some of Oregon’s most coveted Pinot Noir.
The California engineer who moved into a cold Oregon cabin in 1968, planted 23 grape varieties to see what would grow, and helped prove the valley could make great Pinot Noir.
The red volcanic hill where modern Oregon Pinot Noir began — Jory soil, the first plantings, and the day Burgundy moved in next door.
The valley’s highest and most varied AVA — the only one with all three great Oregon wine soils on a single mountain.
An aerospace engineer who designed rockets, co-founded Oregon’s first craft brewery, and refined a Pinot Noir technique that traveled all the way to Burgundy.
The truth about Henry VIII’s gout, his table, and the wines of Tudor England — beyond the myths.
A 1,700-year-old sealed Roman bottle in a German museum — and the 2024 discovery in Spain that just rewrote the record.
The true, sourced story of the Valley’s first vineyards: Lett’s 1965 Corvallis nursery, Coury beside him, the 1966 moves to Dundee and Forest Grove, Erath’s 1969 Chehalem Mountain Vineyard, and Hyland in 1971.
Bacchus began as Bakchos, a Greek title for Dionysus — not a Roman invention. From Bronze Age clay tablets to Anacreon’s drinking songs, Euripides’ Bacchae, a Roman Senate crackdown, and Keats, the three-thousand-year story of the wine god’s names.