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three delicious wines from the northwest BY ROBERT CALVERT
1
150 CSD
They said it couldn’t be done: grow Pinot Noir in Oregon. They were wrong. Pioneers of European origin
brought vinifera vines to the “land of milk and honey” when
traversing the Oregon Trail in the 1830s and 1840s. The vines flourished, as did the settlers. Writing in Winemakers of the Willamette Valley, Vivian Perry and John Vincent report that
the first commercial vineyard in Oregon “was planted in 1852 by Peter Britt” in the Rogue Valley. Winemaking gradually spread elsewhere as farmers planted “hundreds of acres of
grapes and started producing profitable wines.” Ernst Reuter, another early Oregon wine pioneer, “captured a medal for his Riesling at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair.”