Talk-A-Vino

What started from the little idea “yea, I don’t know, I don’t believe in it, but maybe I will try anyway” now became one of my favorite ongoing series in this blog – Stories of Passion and Pinot. Stories of Passion and Pinot are exactly what the title says – these are the stories of the winemakers passionate about one of the most finicky grapes there is – Pinot Noir.

It is a fun exercise to take a retrospective in the ongoing series and see how far I have gone from time to time. So here is the latest update – for me, and for you if you care to read it.

First, last year I created a new landing page for the whole series. This page is kept current, all new interviews are now added to this page and you always know when the page was updated last.

Four new stories were added since the last update: David Adelsheim of Adelsheim Vineyard, Shane Moore of Gran Moraine, Erik Kramer of Willakenzie Estate, and Bill Sanchez of Potter’s Vineyard. All of these are excellent, in-depth interviews – if you have not had a chance to read them yet, you really should do it now.

Interviews in the series have questions tailored to the individual wineries and winemakers with a little overlap between them. However, sometimes it is fun to ask people the same question and enjoy the diversity of the replies. I asked the same two questions to some of the winemakers who had been already profiled in this series – and now I want to share our short Q&A with you.

Sara Specter of Bells Up Winery, Bill Sanchez of Potter’s Vineyard, and Wayne Bailey of Youngberg Hill have graciously agreed to answer my questions, so below you can see my questions – and their answers:

[TaV]: How was the year 2022 for you? New grapes, new plantings, new wines, vineyard discoveries (a new plot/block, for example), new winemaking styles, new wine club, new tasting room, new markets, growing season and the vintage – please share anything and everything you are willing to with our readers.

[Bells Up Winery]: Harvest 2022 was our 10^th under the Bells Up label, having moved to Newberg, Oregon in 2012 and making our first vintage in 2013. Harvest 2022 was also what we’ve been calling “the end of the beginning.” It was the first year we were “100% Pinot Independent,” meaning we didn’t source Pinot Noir from any other grower for the first time. It was a wonderful experience working with other micro-site growers who were very much like us. But our goal has always been to be as close to 100% estate as possible, and now we are… at least for the Pinot Noir. We were also delighted to see that the Pinot Blanc we planted in Fall 2021 and the Schioppettino we planted in Fall 2020 continued to do well, despite some initial concern from the late frost we had in April.

[Potter’s Vineyard]:  2022 was good but tough. It was tough due to the spring frost that wiped out 80% of the primary buds in our vineyard.  The cool, wet spring led to a late start to bloom and fruit set.  We literally did not know if we would have only a tiny harvest or something close to normal until late in the season, which led to a lot of turmoil.  We decided to stay the course and farm it normally assuming that we would have something and of course take care of the vines for the following year.  Amazingly, the vines rebounded and we ended up with about 70% of our normal yield.  And because we farmed and sprayed diligently we did not suffer from the very high amount of powdery mildew that descended upon the Northern Willamette Valley that year.  It was also a year where we added some new effective organic compounds to our organic farming spray program that probably helped fend off powdery mildew.  The Pinot noir fruit was beautiful but we had much less of it.  2022 was also a pivotal year for us in our business.  We bottled our 10th vintage and pondered all year what we would do for the next 10 years.  We’ve made good wine but we decided to try to make better wine as our goal.  We hired a Burgundy trained winery consultant with 35+ years experience.  Combined with our 15+ years we now had over 50 years of combined experience to gain from.  We fine tuned every protocol we had in place and added a lot of additional analyses to our tool box.  We also added a new barrel-side wine analysis device to help us get more analyses done more efficiently and timely.  This helped us get through a tough set of late fermentations of our other varietals that ripened later than normal due to cool spring throughout the NW.  So for us it was a long, tough, and educational year but successful due to our added help and resources.

[Youngberg Hill]: Great growing season. Great balance and complexity in the fruit. A more typical season for the Willamette Valley, later wet spring, cool September and October harvest.

[TaV]: What are your plans for 2023? What do you think the future holds?

[Bells Up Winery]: In 2023 we hope to get enough fruit from the Schioppettino to make a proof-of-concept batch. We will also be releasing our very first bottling of bubbles. The 2022 crop of Seyval Blanc from our estate (first planting in the Willamette Valley of this French hybrid and only the second in the state of Oregon) will be released in a brut style under a new label, “Joy.” In keeping with our practice of naming wines after pieces of music that have terrific French Horn parts, this one is named for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, “Ode to Joy.”

[Potter’s Vineyard]: We plan to continue with this new approach to taste the ‘fruits of our labor’ and continue improving as much as we can.  We know the future will be tough with another global recession looming, however, we will continue to work hard to provide wine lovers a small vineyard & clay art gallery experience and premium wine.

[Youngberg Hill]: We will get our first fruit from the new Wayne’s World block this year, clones 667 and 115. Regarding what the future holds – who knows?

It is so interesting to see different takes on the vintage, the conditions, etc – and of course the future plans. It will also make it fun to ask the exact same questions next year.

There is a number of new interview ideas in the works, so as they like to say it – watch this space…