The Vintners Voice

From within every great wine region comes wines that carry the weight of legend, wines that have reached the status of being fabled. We’ve all heard the stories and blushed in jealousy at reports of groups of millionaires and Masters of Wine assembling in some expensive hotel ballroom to sample wines that most will assume, that like Zeus and Hercules, are mere myths.

Most of these regions are so old that today is but a point in a continuum of wine production that offers no view of the regions early claims to greatness. Today is just too far from the beginning to be able to offer any idea of what those early days were like. Even in the New World, notably California and Australia, the age of the industries are too old to remember their true pioneers, except in old pictures and news clippings.. Time serves to erase memory and effectively obscures the people and conditions that not only create wine regions but elevate them to peaks of greatness.

It was May 7^th 2001 that the Oregon Wine Industry began for me. I had moved to Oregon just year earlier and was touring wine country with a group of ‘wine people’ that included a chef friend of mine. I had increasingly become not merely interested in Pinot Noir, but damn near obsessed. This tour was to visit a number of wineries and vineyards, most arranged to meet and taste with the winemakers. In addition to meeting some of the top winemakers in Oregon, Steve Dorner of Cristom and Terry Casteel of Bethel Heights among them, I also met the starting point of Oregon Pinot Noir. David Lett, of the Eyrie Vineyards, hosted us at his winery in McMinnville.

The wall of the Eyrie winery was covered with old black and white photos of a young man and his wife, brimming with optimism and cradling armfuls of sticks. These sticks were Pinot Noir vines that would be pushed into the ground, in 1965, on an old farm in the Dundee Hills of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. That pushing into the red clay soil of those sticks was the beginning of not just an industry but a story of one of those legendary and fabled wines It was May 7^th 2001 in front of those pictures that I decided that my life would be spent among barrels and vines.

As the legend is told me; in 1979 someone, without David Lett’s knowledge, entered his 1975 South Block Pinot Noir into a wine tasting to be held in Paris. In 1976 the french were devastated and humiliated when several California wines beat them in a blind tasting, conducted by french wine experts. The french hoped for vindication in 1979. They would not have it. The 1975 Eyrie won first place, defeating wines from places and made by people that had previously defined what Pinot Noir should be.

In 1980 there was another tasting held in hopes of reestablishing France’s superiority. This time on the burgundians home turf of Beaune, sponsored by burgundy legend Maison Joseph Drouhin. This time the Eyrie took second. The wine was so convincing that a few years later the Drouhin’s themselves would plant vines in Oregon.

A legend had been born. Now Oregon was on the map as a fine wine region, less than 20 years after the first Pinot vines were planted. David Lett now emerged as a pioneer and thus was born the legend of Papa Pinot. At the center of legend was the 1975 Eyrie South Block Pinot Noir.

As a young winemaker I spent a lot of time and a lot of money seeking out wines that I thought would teach me something about what Pinot Noir should be. You cannot hope to create something great if you do not know what great is. You gather with other young winemakers and taste wines and talk. We would often talk about the 1975 Eyrie South Block Pinot.

I would day dream of some how coning someone into buying a bottle for me to taste. I would fantasize about eating at Nick’s Italian Café or Tina’s Restaurant and David would be there humbly dispensing some of the treasure to anyone who had an empty glass. I think my time would of been better spent imagining myself becoming an NBA star or an Astronaut. I eventually relinquished my hopes of ever tasting the ‘75 Eyrie, it was just a myth, it never really existed.

The other night I went to a local restaurant to celebrate the birthday of one of my dearest friends, who happens to be the marketing manager for the Eyrie Vineyards. We were standing outside of the Red Hills Provincial restaurant in Dundee waiting for a friend to join us when my friends husband reached into his wine bag and slowly slipped a bottle out showing just the neck label. The label simply read 1975. I knew immediately that what he had in his hand was not just a bottle of wine, not just a great bottle of wine but a legend.

We sat at the table and went through a couple bottles of champagne and white wine ( including an ‘87 Eyrie Chardonnay that was beautiful ). My attention was focused on the ‘75. Finally the time came to uncork the myth.

You get nervous around a wine like that. Like the first time you doubt weather there really is a Santa Claus, you are not sure you want reality to dissolve magic. I sat anxiously as the now 33 year old cork, wet and mushy, was slowly being pulled from the wine. What if it was dead? What if it had fallen apart; a hollow core of acid, tannin and aldehydes. We might have to accept the wines mortality and with it our own. If a wine of legend cannot live up to its own myth, how am I supposed to?

The cork was expertly removed and the birthday girl placed the bottle to her nose. She grimaced. The first pour went into her glass, she swirled the glass in her hand and dipped her nose into the crystal bowl. "It’s corked. It think it is corked" she declared. I took the second pour from the glass. Like an Apostle taking Jesus off of the crucifix, I wanted my own proof of its death. I wasn’t about to let someone else declare it dead for me. I wanted to identify the body, as if I had known this wine all my life, as if I were its next of kin.

I have long learned that there are a lot of compounds in wine that have ‘fungal’ smells and have myself mistakenly declared a bottle corked because it simply smelled fungal. When I stuck my nose into that ‘75 Eyrie I certainly smelled ‘fungal’ characters. I then switched my attention to looking for the smell of chlorine. The one thing that separates cork taint, TCA ( trichloroaniasole ) from other fungal smells is that of chlorine.

What I smelled was more of a musty basement aroma, forest floor, mushroom. I swirled the wine quickly, as if doing so was some sort of CPR I could use to bring the wine back to life. I wasn’t the first to taste it, I was still afraid that I might find out that the Wizard was just a man behind a curtain. One of my winemaker friends tasted first and I knew from the movement of his eye brows alone that this was a legend not yet ready to die.

Over the next 40 minutes we were all mesmerized by the aromatic roller coaster this wine was taking us on. Fungal earthy tones followed by spices, flowers and fruit. The wines color was quite intact for its age, the fruit still there, the acid bright and focused. In the mouth the wine was pure, sexy, red velvet. It was a complex mix of pie cherry, cranberry, exotic spices, molasses. The wine showed courage and grace. It was unaware of its age and refused to use a walker or wheelchair. It was the kind of wine that wants to die alone at home, only after its knee’s, hip’s and hand’s have given out. This wine needed no help or excuses. This wine more than lived up to its own Legend.