tasting / savor / Oregon Pinot Noir


OREGON PINOT NOIR: STAYING TRUE TO THE PINOT IDEAL


Andrew Jefford introduces a tasting shared with Anthony Rose and David Williams that confirmed the Pacific North Western state’s reputation as one of the world’s most accomplished producers of the grape variety, with congeniality accompanied in many instances by great complexity


Valley. They weren’t the state’s first Pinot plantings—those took root in 1961 farther south, in the Umpqua Valley; while wine vines in general (notably “Klevner”) have been grown in the state since the 1880s. Few 20th-century planting gestures have been as significant as Lett’s, though. “Papa Pinot” famously claimed that he’d been hit by “a cosmic brick” during his winetasting classes at the University of California, Davis, a bolide dense with the disorientating seductions of red Burgundy. After graduation and a 1964 European research tour, he arrived (against the advice of his Davis professors) in Willamette “with 3,000 vines and a theory.” He rooted the cuttings in a rented nursery block, then went out hunting for suitable land. Eyrie Vineyards in the Dundee Hills was established in 1966.


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The theory has held; the cosmic brick, hurtling forward in spacetime, has blossomed into a meteor shower. In 2022, Oregon had some 18,010ha (44,487 acres) of vineyards, with more than two thirds of those (12,522ha [30,929 acres]) in Willamette. Almost 60% of the planted state acreage is Pinot Noir, and that proportion is even higher in Willamette: around 67%. The Valley and its 11 nested AVA subregions occupy a propitious West Coast “Middle Earth” for Pinot: cloudy, temperate, mild. You don’t get the savage winter chills of Washington


208 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025


arly 2025 will mark 60 years since David Lett first planted Pinot Noir in Oregon’s Willamette


State or British Columbia in Willamette; nor do you get the lavish summer warmth that increasingly characterizes California’s Pinot grounds. Pinot clearly enjoys Willamette’s complex soils, based on marine sediments, basalt, loess, and Missoula-flood deposits; limestone is not necessary to produce beautiful, shapely wines from this cultivar.


The number of wineries increased


fivefold in the first two decades of the 21st century—and the economic model for these tends to follow the small-scale Burgundy blueprint; some 70% of Oregon wineries currently produce less than 5,000 cases a year. There’s a quality emphasis. Oregon may account for less than 1% of US domestic production, but it still managed (for example) to win 23% of the “Top 100” wine slots selected by Wine Spectator critics in 2021. Oregon wines’ average retail price is comfortably above that achieved by either California or Washington State ($17.10 in 2021, compared with $10.46 and $8.15 respectively).


OUR THREE TASTERS WERE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE OREGON PINOTS WE SURVEYED, AND THIS TASTING WAS SUCCESSFUL, WITH THE TOP 25 WINES ALL AVERAGING 90 POINTS OR ABOVE


Affability and more


Our three tasters were all enthusiastic about the Oregon Pinots we surveyed, and this tasting was successful, with the top 25 wines (out of 45) all scoring an aggregate of 90 points or above. Scores of 93 or above equate to “Outstanding wine of great beauty and articulacy,” according to the World of Fine Wine rubric. Our most enthusiastic taster—David Williams— found no fewer than ten wines meriting 93 points and two meriting 94 and 95. Anthony Rose noted four wines on 93 and two each on 94 and 95, while I had five wines on 93 with one each on 94 and 95. David drew attention to the “consistent ripeness sweet spot” of these “alluringly fleshy but fluent wines,” which managed to avoid the pitching between over- and under-ripeness typical of non- Burgundian Pinot elsewhere. Anthony Rose, too, admired their consistency, though he chose to highlight their “excellent fragrance, freshness, energy, and charming drinkability, closer in style to red Burgundy than any other Pinot Noir region I can think of.” Both comments imply affability— and this is what I would underline. There wasn’t a single difficult or forbidding wine in the top half of our entry, and those that did disappoint in the lower half generally did so due to over-exuberance with oak or with fruit expression, or because of a lack of purity or precision. The finest wines, meanwhile, conveyed compelling aromatic complexity married to impressive depth and structure—a combination rare outside Burgundy.


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