Everett, Wash.
Published: Saturday, October 11, 2008

Oregon's Willamette Valley could be the next Napa

By Christopher Reynolds
Los Angeles Times

 MCMINNVILLE, Ore. -- Blame the volcanoes of the Northwest that sent so much lava roaring through this valley about 16 million years ago and set the stage. Or blame the glaciers of Montana for forcing floods, about 14,000 years ago, that carried in so many tons of rich dirt.

Or you could just blame David Lett. He was the 25-year-old who rolled in from California 43 years ago with a trailer full of vine cuttings and a crazy dream about something called Pinot. And now the Willamette Valley is never going to be the same.

After spending most of the 20th century as a haven for hazelnut growers and turkey farmers, this territory, about an hour's drive south of Portland, now belongs to the Pinot grape and those who admire it.

Stand on high ground in the Dundee Hills and you see the trained vines march across the landscape, row by row, like a green invading army or the cast of China's Olympic ceremony. About 275 wineries do business here, joined by burgeoning numbers of tasting rooms, restaurants and lodgings.

The nuts and birds are still around -- in fact, Oregon still produces most of this country's hazelnuts, also known as filberts. But since Lett and fellow Pinot pioneers, including Dick Erath, Bill Blosser and Susan Sokol Blosser, started making wine here in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the way of the grape has been ascendant.

For anybody accustomed to California tasting rooms, this is a different sort of wine country -- cooler than the California vineyards of Napa or Sonoma or Santa Ynez or San Luis Obispo County; more suited to small-volume operations; and without a single big, fancy hotel.

Here for three weekdays in September, I paid $55 a night for a tiny hotel room (bathroom down the hall) and $20 a day for a rental car (Thrifty, at the Portland airport). I dined without reservations at several well-regarded restaurants. I drank a lot.

The Willamette Valley is about 100 miles long, with six sub-appellations, each offering its own microclimate. It is not quite nirvana -- not with such cold, wet winters and not with such congestion on the area's main artery, Oregon Highway 99W, around the town of Dundee.

And if you're bringing along somebody you want to impress, a $55 room at McMenamins Hotel Oregon isn't the ticket. But the commanding views from the five-year-old Black Walnut Inn in Dundee ($295 and up) or the 18-year-old Wine Country Farm in Dayton ($130 and up) will do the trick.

This is a destination coming of age, with enough charms and quirks to satisfy serious wine people and the rest of us too.

This is "the next Napa, no doubt," said John Stuart, the owner of Abbey Road Farm who arrived from Las Vegas five years ago and raised a few eyebrows by building five luxury guest suites inside three old grain silos.

Of course if you ask a longtime Oregonian about the Napa thing, you probably will get an earful on how this will never be another Napa but something kinder, gentler and more concerned with substance than style.

But the rest of the world is certainly here, including the French. Domaine Drouhin

Oregon, a satellite of the revered winemaking Drouhin family of Burgundy, has run vineyards and a winery here since 1987. Its tasting room opened in 2004, and it has gone Oregon eco-native: In August the winery added a large array of solar panels.

Meanwhile, new lodgings are rising.

For careful spenders, Comfort Suites opened in McMinnville in October with 66 rooms. For others, construction has begun in Newberg on an 85-room, 35-acre upscale resort called the Allison Inn & Spa, expected to open in August with rates beginning at $295.

If you get here in October, you might catch the last of the year's warmer, drier weather, and you're bound to get a glimpse of the grape harvest. At Thanksgiving, you'll find the valley buzzing with wine-soaked special events. If you wait until spring or summer, when most visitors arrive, you'll have the comfort of milder weather and extended tasting-room hours.

I based my wanderings in McMinnville, the seat of Yamhill County. Amid the eateries and shops in the city's old downtown, the McMenamin brothers, creators of a brew-pub empire in Oregon and Washington, playfully rehabbed the 1905 Hotel Oregon into a raffish hangout with bar and restaurant below, 42 rooms above and a bar and patio on the roof. Rates start at $50, but for a private bath you'll pay $90 or more.

The biggest attraction in McMinnville proper, by many measures, is probably the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum (open daily), which has an Imax theater and scores of aircraft, including the Spruce Goose, the enormous wooden plane built by Howard Hughes in the 1940s.

From McMinnville you can make a day trip to the coast (Lincoln City is about 50 miles southwest of McMinnville), hike in Silver Creek Falls State Park (53 miles southeast of McMinnville), book a balloon ride, take a daylong wine-country tour, gamble at Spirit Mountain casino in Grand Ronde (about 18 miles southwest of McMinnville) and browse for garden wares and nursery items at Red Ridge Farms in Dayton.

The first tasting stop is a not-especially-scenic former poultry plant on Northeast 10th Avenue in Dundee. This is where Lett and his wife, Diana, founded Eyrie Vineyards in 1966.

David Lett arrived in Oregon by way of the University of California, Davis and planted the first Pinot Noir and the first Pinot Gris grapes here. In those first years, he paid the bills with his day job selling textbooks, while his wife worked as a teacher.

Now so many winemakers have followed Eyrie's lead that the neighborhood is known as the "Pinot Ghetto." Two years ago Eyrie opened its modest tasting room. It holds about 20 people, and tasters pay $5.

If Eyrie is Yamhill County yin, then the yang must be the palatial Domaine Serene in Dayton. Owners Ken and Grace Evenstad arrived in Oregon in 1989, invested millions in making and promoting their estate-grown Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays, and in 2005 they opened a tasting room on grounds as grandiose as Eyrie's are humble. The cost to taste is $15.

Just a short stroll from Domaine Serene stands the Wine Country Farm, which includes a bed-and-breakfast with nine rooms. This is where Jake Price, owner and chief guide of Equestrian Wine Tours, begins his $50-an-hour trail rides.
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA