The Future of Willamette Valley Wine with Limited Addition's Bree & Chad Stock

Class Transcript:

All right, here we go. Welcome, one and all, wherever you are joining us. I hope you're outside. I hope your internet connection extends that far. It is a beautiful day here in Washington, D.C. Chad and Bree, how's the weather in your corner of the world? Liquid sunshine, typical rainy Oregon. Nice, the best, but you get most of your rain now, don't you? We sure do, we rely on it, yeah. All right, that whole temperate rainforest thing, not a joke. Yeah, you got it. Well, thank you for joining us, even if you are not sacrificing a sunny day for the sake of making this class. We're irrationally excited to have you all with us, not least of all because you're friends of friends. We have a wonderful restaurant connection.

I hope Nate and/or Zalima is listening here somewhere. Actually, Nate and Zalima, first, turn me on to your wines, and I'm ever grateful that they did so. Zoe, say hello to the people. Zoe's in New York City. Zoe, how's the weather in New York? Gorgeous, love it. Yeah? Are the people of Chinatown out and about, or is it? Indeed, it's been a really nice little weekend. There's been a lot of activism, of course. This weekend as well, which has been really nice to see and to support some local businesses, so I've really enjoyed it. Good for you, Zoe. Brent, so we have not one, not two, but three wines from limited edition. That's A-D-D-I-T-I-O-N, and I learned the hard way that Gmail is very, both Google and Gmail are incredibly rigorous about changing the addition to edition.

It's not a misspelling either. It's kind of obnoxious on Google's part. I just want to tell them to ease up, guys. I've searched for this a dozen times now. Come on. Yeah. We agree. We'd support that. But that is their latest venture, and we're tasting your first vintage, are we not? You certainly are. That is so exciting. I was thrilled. I followed. I followed Chad's winemaking through various imprints over the years and was incredibly excited when these wines came to market through one of our favorite kind of local reps, Patrick at MFW, and we snapped up all that we could and wanted to arrange a proper virtual release party for the occasion. So thank you so much, Chad and Brie, for joining us for the occasion. We'll give folks a few more minutes to join.

We have three wines for the occasion. We're going to taste in kind of a fascinating order. I touched base with Chad and Brie yesterday, and Chad's one request was that we don't talk about the wines. He doesn't want us to talk about them. Jack thought it was pretty fucking amazing. He wants to talk about everything that comes with the wine and use the wines as a touchstone for all of these other things that are happening in the Willamette Valley. And, you know, the changes they would like to see in the industry there and, you know, you know, the kind of future they would like to see for the place and its wines. And I certainly want to honor that.

But I want to honor the wines as well in their deliciousness because they are, you know, made in a manner that doesn't contribute to human misery, but they're equally delicious, you know, beverages and, you know, in very different ways, you know, stylistically very, very different in a cool way. And you're using all sorts of different vessels here. I love the shot of your cellar. I'll share later. But it is, you know, just like an island of misfit toys of, you know, stainless and, you know, neutral oak and, you know, amphora. It's a little bit of everything. It's awesome. And you rarely see that. Usually people, you know, find a lane and stay in it for the sake of their winemaking. So the Wanderlust is awesome. But we're going to start with Pinot Noir blend.

This is Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. We're going to move on to Carbonic Cap Franc and then close things out. We're going to start with dry, vitre-tized Chenin Blanc to kind of, you know, move into, you know, the wines of the future, the great new world of Willamette Valley wine beyond Pinot Noir, which is so exciting. Big ups to all of you who ordered the mushroom onion dip this week. I had that earlier today. If you didn't order the mushroom onion dip, you're missing out because it is pretty delicious with all these wines. So shameless self-promotion. And I'm sorry we couldn't send one your way on the West Coast. And Zoe, you didn't pick yours up, sadly, early enough this week to benefit.

But I hope there's some kind of like, you know, maybe like a Crab Rangoon situation I feel like would be good with the Chenin or, you know, there's a lot of great Chinese food pairing applications for these wines. Neither here nor there. We've given folks enough time. I'm going to move on to a bit of verse to kick things off, as we always do. Yesterday was the best. The vernal equinox. So it was, you know, 12 days equally for those of us all around the world of, you know, sunlight and dark. And, you know, I think it's particularly poetic and, you know, fitting because spring brings with it this year, hopefully kind of, you know, the pandemic waning. And, you know, there's a lot of hope associated with that.

So I've been reading a lot of spring poems. You know, every poet since time immemorial likes to write about spring. This is a bit of newer verse from Amy Gersler called In Perpetual Spring. Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off, turn into birds if they fall on land and colored carp if they plop into water. Suddenly the archetypical human desire for peace. With every other species welling up in you, the lion and the lamb cuddling up, the snake and the snail kissing, even the prick of the thistle, queen of the weeds, revives your secret belief in perpetual spring, your faith that for every hurt there is a leaf to cure it.

That's a good one, and I think fitting for you all because Chad and Bree, you guys got your your first dose of vaccination yesterday, did you not? Sure did. Congratulations to you. Hi. How do you feel today? He's fine. I don't even have arm pain. I don't, it never happened, and she couldn't sleep on her left side last night. That's about as bad as it got for her. So, you know. Yeah, but we're happy to, happy to have our first shot in. Great, great. And I hope all of you in our audience, you know, are finding your way to the vaccination yourself, and hopefully we'll be able to do more of this in person. As opposed to virtually in the not too distant future.

Without kind of further ado, I'm going to give you kind of a brief rundown on the Willamette Valley, and I'll keep it as brief as humanly possible because we have experts, bona fide experts here. I always feel, especially with guests in the contents of my brief introduction, that I'm like white mansplaining something to people who are much more qualified to, you know, introduce the region as such. But I have to justify my presence. I'm beyond mere moderator, so I'm going to keep it brief, but I'll give you, you know, a whirlwind history of the Willamette Valley, and, you know, that starts millions of years ago. The land that is now the Willamette, ancient seafloor, and the valley itself is formed between coastal ranges, essentially the folding of tectonic plates, the Pacific and the continental as they come together.

And the rock that was exposed there. Was, You Know, Kind of Largely Ancient Seafloor, So You Get, You Know, Tubaceous Sandstone, Which Is Calcium-Bearing Sandstone, Which Is to Say, You Know, Essentially Ancient Marine Life. And You Get on the Valley Floor, Well, It Should Be Said, You Get Basalt, Which Is Intrusive Volcanic Rock from Volcanic Activity, Particularly in the Cascades. Oregon Has a State Soil, Which Is Very Exciting for Me. Jory is the State Soil, and Gets Probably More Credit Than It Should for the Deliciousness of Wines, and Is a Very Good Marketing Vehicle for Willamette Pinot, but, You Know, Who Else Celebrates a State Soil? I Think Good on You, Oregon, for Celebrating State Soil. I'm All for That.

And then very significantly, too, for the sake of, you know, just how verdant the valley is, you have this other bit, which is a glacial lake outburst silt. And that dates from, I don't know. From 12 to 15,000 years ago, Missoula floods in the house. So basically, you had a series of ice dams in what is now Montana that, you know, kind of variously collapsed and reformed over the course of the ice ages and transported all sorts of silt, which is incredibly fertile to the Willamette Valley floor. It should be said that silt does not, you know, have a huge place in, you know, in the valley. You know, the winemaking story in the valley is that most of the silt, honestly, too fertile for grapes to, you know, really thrive and make great wine.

The valley floor devoted more to hazelnuts and Christmas trees these days. But at any rate, you can see the soil series here. They reference laurel wood, but it's another type of windblown silt, not unlike Austrian loess in and of its own right, but the sedimentary, you know, kind of that ancient sea floor that, you know, the Kenzie series in the Jory, much more significant for the sake of the wines that we're going to be dealing with. Now, for the sake of grape growing, that first came to Oregon per Henderson Yuling. That's a tough last name, but he was a horticulturalist that made his way to what white folk at the time called the Promised Land of Flowing Milk and Honey in 1847. Now, it should be said, it was a promised land.

It wasn't a promised land for white settlers, but it had been a promised land for the Kalapuya people, who were the American Indian inhabitants for thousands and thousands of years. Sadly, the vast majority of them died off between 1830 and 1833, over 90% of the population because of smallpox and other European diseases. Also not invited to that party, African Americans. This state was founded with a territorial. Black Exclusion Act intact. So it was very much an agricultural utopia, but a white utopia at that. And, you know, I think always important for the sake of these founding mythologies to acknowledge who was and who wasn't invited to the party. So first grapes, Isabella, that dated from the American South, planted 18'47.

It should be said most of the grapes in Oregon, most of the early wine industry in Oregon was in the southern part of the state, in the Rogue Valley. The Willamette was, you know, truly kind of terra incognita for wine. It was thought to be outside of, too far north, too cold, too wet for proper wine growing until the 60s. And then you had all of these pioneers. Cheaply UC Davis trained David Lett and Charles Corey, who made their way up. David Lett, famously Papa Pinot. Charles Corey gives it its name to a Pinot Noir clone that, you know, has this, you know, really important, plays this really important part in the early planning decisions throughout the valley. But David Lett, beginning in 65, Charles Corley around the same time they planted Pinot in the Willamette Valley.

They had both traveled widely in Europe, which is kind of a bit of a departure from most of the, their colleagues in California. California is very insular at that time. Andre Celestiaff had made his way there from France already. However, you know, a lot of the winemakers on the ground didn't have a Eurocentric outlook. From the early days of kind of winemaking in the Willamette, you know, there was very much a, you know, kind of eastward looking old world oriented mentality. And from its earliest days, the Willamette Valley was very much devoted to cool climate varietals. And a lot of these former students of California professors were told that they would fail miserably. You know, growing grapes, making wine in Oregon because it was too cold. But you have these pioneers.

This is David and his wife, Diana. I love this picture. This is like old school, you know, 60s hippies making wine. David no longer with us. Diana still. David's son, Jason, doing the winemaking now. David also introduced Pinot Gris to the valley. Other early pioneers include Dick Arath, Dick Ponzi, who were engineers. They were out of the UC Davis fold. But, you know, that generation. You know, still going strong to this day. Still defining taste, for better or worse, in the valley. It should be, you know, said that, you know, the Willamette makes a, in the global scheme of things, a relatively small trickle of wine. It accounts for about 70% of the plantings in Oregon. But Oregon only makes about 1.5% of the wine that comes out of the country.

That said, there are almost 800 wineries in Oregon. So, you know, that says something about the scale of the winemaking there. From its earliest days, it has always been done on an artisanal scale. And it has always been, you know, the industry has always been driven by passionate artisans. Who are seeking to make, you know, profoundly delicious wines. And, you know, environmental stewardship has always been a part of that story. It should be said, though, that Pinot Noir has become an outsized part of that story. It accounts for about 60% of the plantings in the valley. And, you know, a big part of what, you know, Brie and Chad are all about is, you know, kind of diversifying that playing field for a variety of reasons that we will explore throughout the following discourse.

So hopefully I kept that short enough. Feel free to correct anything that I got wrong there, guys. I have additional graphics and we can talk Pinot clones and all sorts of stuff later. But, you know, those are the brass tacks. For the sake of, you know, how did wine come to the Willamette Valley in, you know, five to ten minutes? You know, Brie does quite a bit of education in her own right. Brie Stock is a Master of Wine, which is an even more amazing certification than Master Sommelier because the tasting regime is harder. And she had to write a proper dissertation to get that title. Gangster. Pretty much all my wine heroes, especially Jancis Robinson, are Masters of Wine, not Master Sommelier.

Much more kind of trade side, much more into the economics of the wine business than it is devoted to what I do on the floor or mostly what I don't do on the floor, honestly, on a nightly basis. But without further ado, how did the two of you come to the Willamette Valley? You are not Willamette Valley natives. And why did you stay there? I'm going to shut up now. I was just going to say, and Masters of Wine are actually much more equitable in their certifications of both men and women, sir. And transparent in how they implement their tasting regime and, you know, the criteria they establish for their, you know, and, you know, it's a better organization. That's not the topic of this. Sorry. A lot less scandals as well.

Yeah. And they're just treated a little bit. Yeah. Much, much to recommend them. But, work, I mean, it should be said, work to be done everywhere for the sake of diversifying the wine industry. You know, I don't want to pretend we're more virtuous than we are, but without further ado. Yeah, no, we're still a very classist and elite, you know, access to education for the wine industry is an issue everywhere. And it needs to be constantly addressed. So I'm happy to say that the MW program is working on that. But everyone needs to really make the on-ramps to equitable and accessible wine education. And career opportunities. And career opportunities. Equal pay and all that fun stuff. Yeah. And it should be said, you know, what I love about this project, and it's, you know, kind of baked into your, you know, mission statement.

You say, you know, we believe it's a privilege to farm these sales and our work committed to expanding the conversation around sustainable practices in the wine industry. So, you know, this, I feel like, you know, wine for all of us. And, you know, I definitely share this perspective. Is, you know, something that's delicious in and of itself, but also a means to an end. You know, to make the world the kind of place that you want to live in. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point. Actually, I think we were just discussing this this morning or maybe yesterday after we got off the chat with you yesterday, Bill. We just continued to the discussion. But saying that, yeah, you know, this is an a vessel or a craft that can really be a platform for many important discussions.

And if you're not having those discussions, who really needs another wine label out there? That's a, you know. Yeah, we don't need more wine, right? We need better messaging and we need new ideas and innovation and we need cultural change and education and just making another sort of a state wine with, you know, your family crest. And your name on it or whatever. It's just it's not it's just not helping anybody. So, Bri, you're an Aussie and a bit of a globetrotter. How did you land in Willamette Valley? And, you know, you you've been everywhere, you know, so you had, and I feel like Aussies just travel. You know, you guys get out and everybody loves you, too. You're just fun, fun people. So they would have welcomed you with open arms anywhere.

Why did you decide to stay in the Willamette Valley? You know, the Pacific Northwest is really compelling. I love the I love the environment here and the climate and the fact that it's a small industry and a fairly collaborative industry as well. But really, after working in several different European regions in several different Australian regions, I felt like there was just so much potential here. In in Oregon and especially in the Willamette Valley that hadn't really been discovered or wasn't being spoken about. And that was my first impression in 2015 when I I had come here after being invited to Pino Camp in 2014. And that was actually how I met my husband. Did he afford you the invitation to Pino Camp? Or? No, no, no. I don't support or participate in Pinot Camp.

Not, you know, nothing to say about it. You were like the cool you were like the cool townie who she met on like a an off day, you know, when she left the Pino Camp campus. I returned. I returned after Pino Camp and I returned to work harvest with Mimi Castile. Yeah. So everyone who's met Mimi and knows Mimi under, you know, understands why I would have returned to work harvest with with Mimi at Bethel Heights when she was there. But I was also writing some articles for some Australian publications. And I was just being sent to, you know, naturally Pinot Noir producer after Pinot Noir producer after Pinot Noir producer. And after about four days of that. I was pretty sick and tired of Pinot Noir, to be honest.

And so I finally said to someone, OK, but what else is happening here? Like, I get the Pinot Noir thing. I really, I really do get it. You know, you've successfully established that brand. It's good. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but yeah, what else is happening? And and so they said immediately, oh, you need to meet Chad Stock. Apparently I did. You're the like the Pinot Noir Svengali then. That's like the. Yeah, exactly. There's a there's a small army of us now. It's the culture's growing. Real change is happening. I was kind of a lone ranger, you know, 15, 12 years ago. But no, I mean, now there's an army and it's pretty amazing. And Chad, you are a native Californian, are you not? Yes. Yeah. Canadian born.

But my parents are American, so I grew up in California for most of my life and they were natives of Washington, so they lived in Seattle. And so we would drive from California to Seattle all the time throughout my life to go see family because they were the only ones. Yeah, it was great. So I drove through the Northwest and spent a lot of time in the Northwest throughout my life and just always found it to be a really beautiful place. When I finished high school and was looking at college, I knew that I was interested in the Northwest. And so I applied at universities and was able to to be accepted basically to go to Eugene to study at the University of Oregon.

And when I was in Eugene, I actually was working in restaurants and started nothing fancy or anything, but like started drinking wine a little bit because I started to get to the age towards like, OK, we're in college, we're partying. Right. And everybody's bringing beer and whatever they're drinking. And I honestly, I could not stand the taste of beer at that time. Yeah. And I didn't like hard alcohol either. I was like a pretty serious athlete. So I got into wine because the restaurant that I was working at was serious enough to at least just have average Chianti or whatever. And so I was like the dude that showed up to a party with a bottle of Chianti or like a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. And that was what I got ripped off of.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And what I eventually, what I eventually learned about myself is that I'm actually quite obsessed with flavor. And so when I'm, you know, in college trying to figure out what am I going to drink? What am I going to do with my career? Like, what do I want to choose for a profession? I looked at culinary arts. I looked at food sciences and started realizing I didn't want to make Kraft macaroni and cheese for a living. And, you know, whatever. Right. Make fake food. And so, like, I started to take it more seriously that OK, you know, I'm actually living in a wine region. And I started going to wine shops and I started talking to winemakers and stuff locally.

And then I got sucked into the local culture and it was just incredible. I thought it was awesome. And at the time, there wasn't a great university option in Oregon. There is now; there are two different really great accredited schools here in Oregon. And so I ended up going back to California so I can get an analogy degree. And once I got into the analogy program at Fresno State where I went to school, I just never looked back. It was so fun. The nine semesters of chemistry, not so fun, but it was a fucking great time. And so that was college. I got my college experience. It was great. And the second I was done, I literally went straight to Oregon like six months later. And I've just never left.

And I've spent, you know, I mean, I've worked in Australia and hoped to find an Australian woman when I was there. And I ended up having to come back home to find an Australian woman because, yes, I agree with you. Australian people are awesome. And I've been here ever since. And so even though I drink globally and study a lot, pretty much all my energy and knowledge is really about this place. That's awesome. Now, we have kind of derided Willamette Valley Pinot. But the first wine we're going to taste here is Willamette Valley Pinot. So you're going to have to square that circle for us. And, you know, there are, you know, a few, you know, for the sake of our regular, you know, viewers, there are a few things that, you know, are super cool about this one.

First of all, I name dropped that or I referenced that picture of your cellar. Whose cellar is this where you are making your wines? So my cellar. My cellar is my day job because we still don't, you know, we can't pay the bills with our own, our own company yet. This is where I work. So this is David Hill Winery in Forest Grove, Oregon. And this is where Charles Corey, one of the original pioneers, planted his vines. It's now called David Hill. And those vines are still here. It's a beautiful, old historic property. And this is a view into the cellar. So most of what you see is stuff that we use for the David Hill winemaking business. So the big Austrian oval casks that you see over there, those are for the aromatic Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris programs.

And then the barrels, the barriques that you see that are there, those are average or sort of common burgundy barrels, basically, which is the primary shape that's used in most wineries here for obvious reasons. And then the amphora that you see that are there, those are also a part of the David Hill program, but they're a part of our program as well. So some of those belong to them. Some belong to us. Those are actually Oregon-made, which is amazing, by an incredible family. Beckham Estate is the name of their winery. Andrew Beckham is a professional potter, and he builds those clay amphora. So we make some orange wine. That's him. Yeah, he's a beast. So we make some orange wine at David Hill with those amphora. It's a Gewurztraminer, Riesling, Pinot Gris co-fermentation.

And then we also make wines in them as well, but they have not been released yet. They're going to be part of our spring release of wines that are going to go to market here. Awesome. So we are working with Pinot, but this is not a, you know, kind of Catholic, straightforward sanctity of a single varietal kind of, you know, Pinot. You made the choice in this particular vintage to, you know, kind of, I mean, leaven or lighten, as it were, Pinot Noir with Pinot Gris. You know, I think a few things there. You know, Pinot is kind of this, this genetically diverse family of grapes. Pinot Grigio itself is this wacky chimera, genetically. But, you know, why did you make that choice for that particular one?

This is made from 943 and Vadensville clone primarily. 943 is pretty small, buried and has pretty intense. I'm sorry. I couldn't get 943. 943 pick. This is, this is the best. This is actually a really terrible picture. And I apologize for those of you at home that are squinting. But this is the best image I could get of the major clones in the Willamette Valley. And the Vadensville is the one kind of in the middle on the left. But 943 is super, super rare, as I understand it, as clones of Pinot Noir go. Yes. Yeah. It's definitely one of the newer plantings. And there's not too much, much of it. But the Keeler estate vineyard where the fruit was sourced from is a west-facing bank of basically volcanic basalt rock.

And it, you know, is west-facing. It sits right next to Antiqua Terra. And if you've ever, you know, been to Antiqua Terra or heard Maggie talk about that vineyard, it's, you know, like stomping on solid rock. And so these vines are incredibly concentrated. Incredibly intense. And the hottest part of the day in the Willamette Valley is generally in that late afternoon period. We're so northerly in latitude that our major heat of the day comes between 3 and 6 p.m. And so these vines just bake in the sun. And they get really ripe. And the skins get pretty thick and pretty intense. And, you know, the alcohol is, you know, it shoots up because of the sugars and that setting sun.

And, you know, in combination with how people farm here, because of the spring rainfall pressure, you know, everyone is very stringent about de-leafing and opening up the canopy. And, you know, it looks like you just have great bunches just hanging out. And then you have like a bunch of things out there with no leaf covering them. It's, you know, it's been totally denuded Brazilian of leaf, you know, it's just I've never seen anything like it coming from Australia. You've got to scorch dirt. Yeah. So when we got, so when we got this fruit in to the winery, you know, we only had a one-ton fermenter of it. And, you know, it's fermentable. Through and you know I was in there doing you know pump overs on it, and um this was when Chad was still at minimus, um at Craft Sellers, and um you know I remember I remember talking to him, I'm like 'how's the fermentation looking?' He's like 'uh, it looks like a blackberry pie jam' And I freaked out, oh yeah, it was, it smelled like pie, it was really powerful. This is this is from uh, the NFW set but we have a lot of uh people that get hugely curious about foot treading wines and you know given that we featured a lot of you know you know wines made minimal additions you know foot treading has been a part of you know the the wine journey that we've been on throughout pandemic so I thought it was nice that you guys had some uh, you know solid documentation of your pressing efforts yeah and I have hobbit feet so they're like super big, they're perfect for foot treading.

You are they were like genetically engineered, so you were like 'yeah poor poor grape stopping' That's amazing, exactly yeah. So, so when Chad said that to me, and I, and I was in the cellar thinking about, oh my god, this wine is intense. I phoned um, my friend at Keeler, and I said, uh, hey, do you have any of that Pinot Gris that's still available because I think I'm gonna need a half ton, and, and they were like, okay, you only just want a little bit; I'm like, yeah, and then, and so they delivered it. And, uh, we, so it was about seven days into the Pinot Noir fermentation or eight days into the Pinot Noir fermentation when we um added de-stemmed Pinot Gris berries to um, to the vessel in the hope that we would bring some vitality and life and juiciness and energy to this Pinot Noir.

That was swiftly back in the cellar, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm gonna need a half ton of this Pinot Noir coming jam, yeah, yeah. I'm sure many of you have seen this in person; you know, yeah? Is that something that you all had done, or have you tried, you know, at your wineries before, or is that just something that you know, kind of, um, you had, you know, tried other examples of and thought worked well, um, you know it, it feels like you know because it's kind of like a trick that you had in your back pocket; um, no, well, we've been, we've been doing mixed fermentation with white fruit and red fruit in various different um forms throughout our careers, and So, we have a lot of experience with it and um and Pinot Gris is um is the most widely available white grape varieties for starters and two, it's it's genetically from the same family, so there's just a lot of really good sound reasoning to sort of combine the two and um, so yes, we did Iron Chef this because we haven't technically done this exact combination really very much, but but we knew what we were getting into for the most part. It should be said this is a picture of Pinot Gris on the vine. So, Pinot Gris is kind of mis you know branded as a white grape; it is, it is a you know very pale-skinned red grape essentially um and yeah, but the Best, best versions of Pinot Gris that come out of the Willamette Valley are fermented on their skins, their orange wines those are the best versions.

There are a couple of exceptions where there's some really good old vine material where there's some some some cool actual noble white wines, but for the most part the really great great stuff is the stuff that's been being done uh fermented on skins as orange wines that have been developing by several different producers here over the last decade. Yeah, so so the Pinot Noir is um so this wine is the M4 uh red blend, so it's 70 percent Pinot Noir and 30 percent Um, Pinot Gris, and there was some healthy debate in the cellar about me adding those Pinot Gris berries, yeah. Chad was like, 'No, uh, Pinot Gris is too spicy, it's too tannic, it's not gonna work,' and yeah, so there was there was some wrangling that that happened and uh, it worked out, it worked great.

No, the wine we loved the wine, we were super, super happy with how it came out. Um, it's just why, why for this particular offering well um, sorry you want to answer that one okay so the Beckham family were very close friends we've been working with them and for a while and we're working with since the very first year of production and um and we've Been sharing a lot of experimentation back and forth between us to try to figure out how to use them best, how to ferment them, what which which wines seem to have the best um aging characteristics and flavor impact from the amphora and and um and so we had some of the original prototypes uh in the cellar at the time and so we had seen some really great success with uh with some of the Pinot Noir that they were making uh and most of the varieties that we were working with were non-Pinot Noir and so that's kind of where we were crossing over a lot of knowledge and so with the success of what the Beckhams have been doing, we felt very Very confident that this would be with the flavor profile and the iron sort of rich characteristics of the wine, uh, that it would be a good fit you know what do you, what would be different about this wine if you had chosen say neutral oak well I, I think the the other with how intense the berry the Pinot Noir was from Keely in that vintage as well, the amphora um tends to make tannins more approachable earlier and they tend to um make from from my palate they tend to make the wines more drinkable earlier, and so knowing that you know this wine could potentially be a bit of a beast I didn't want to put it into into oak um and and let Those you know, tannins take a long time to resolve. Um, I really wanted to have them in, in the amphora and have that sort of, um, ferrous iron note matching with the volcanic minerality that was coming from the fruit as well.

Um, so for me, it was you know, and it was a big debate as well about how long do we keep it in the amphora? Um, you know, so it was, we kept tasting and tasting and tasting, and and for a wine to go through these really funny, you know, phases as well. So um, it was, it was part of for me, it was you know, part understanding that that journey that wine goes through in in an amphora as well. So that's that's how we came up with that. it's it's beautiful i really love it and it does have like um you know for me you know wines made well in for always have this like live wire minerality um you know and and they retain acid just really beautifully um uh and there's something like vital and you know um you know kind of essential about them in in a really like primal almost about them in a in a really in in the tannins you know i've i've read you know that they they do soften earlier but they never disappear there's always this dusty you know kind of you know quality that's you know must be attributable to the to the clay um and then i mean i haven't had this experience myself but um i i heard i've read that they do wonderful work clarifying the wine essentially so it's like no need to find or filter after something goes into clay because the clay kind of does that work for you yeah exactly and that's you know important for for us with not wanting to manipulate our wines you know it was part of the decision for adding the pinot gris in the first place was that we didn't want to have to add tartaric acid which is what a lot of people have to do to keep the phs um down and you know the wines fresh um for pinot noir and so we were looking for a natural way to do that um and that was where the pinot gris came Into play there, um, and also the M4 component to you know to your point keeping that freshness because these wines that are in M4 do seem to have that vibrancy and brightness of fruit and freshness, and we just really wanted to harness that and make sure that it hung around in the wine as well. Awesome, uh, zo, how is the chat progressing, um?

We have a lot of really great questions, um, to start it off, um? Could you talk to us about a little bit more about like a general rule of thumb, the difference between aging times for amphora in comparison to oak barrels, both new and neutral steel and concrete? Um, is it like something where you just taste It's until you know it's it's just about right, or some longer shorter for Pinot Noir in Noir specifically, um, you know there's always going to be variable, there's always going to be variability, and so when you get comfortable enough with using any of these types of vessels, you always know that there's a window of like when you sort of expect it's going going to be in you know in a good spot, but ultimately you have to sort of taste and pull the trigger sometimes it might be a little earlier than you thought or it could be a little later than you thought depending on the vintage and the characteristics of the wines so you know.

There's it's predictable, uh, for sure, but if you were to compare, for I'm probably going to forget some of these vessels, you asked about, but anything you ferment or uh age in stainless steel, it doesn't really, it doesn't really evolve much, to be honest. Um, um, it's going to be the slowest developing of any of those vessels that you've listed, uh, the M4 will be the fastest, uh, it just depends, yes I'm sorry to speak over you no no no you're way good um yes they're they're faster and the reason why is because they're more porous. It just depends on the producer of the amphora and how their clay is sourced and how hot they're firing the clay. Is and how hot they're firing the clay is, and how hot they're firing the amphora.

Uh, the higher that you fire the temperatures in the kiln for example, uh, the less porous they'll be and um, eventually you get to a point which I believe the term is called vitrification, which basically means you've heated it back to rock right because clay is basically eroded rock so you basically just turn it back into solid rock so you could actually make it completely uh non-breathable actually if you go too high. So, knowing your producer of M4 is really critical there. Uh, new oak would probably be the next. New oak has more oxygen transfer. Capacity through the wood than old oak, uh, I can't remember exactly why, but it basically has something to do with the pathways through the wood over time slowly getting plugged up, um, by the wines that have been aged in them and then they lose that pathway.

And so really old barrels could actually be very anaerobic, um, definitely not like stainless steel, but pretty slow, uh, cement that's also similar, uh, in terms of, uh, the density... what's the shape of the cement? You know how thick are the walls? You know there's a bunch of different so hot right now, the eggs are so hot, yeah, they are, and they have for me, in my opinion, they have A pretty limited use cement, in general, has a pretty limited use at least here in the Wyman Valley, because um we don't, we don't have the chemistries and most of the fruit that we grow, we don't quite have the chemistries that are ideally used to make the cement, so we don't have the chemistries that are ideally used to um.

I feel like I feel like it wants like Mediterranean fruit, you know it wants like you know big, ripe wines to, you know, tame a bit. It does feel like sort of one of two extremes, like what you're talking about, it could be amazing in certain parts of Italy, the wines have so much density to them, like just, you know, they just Have power in spades, like they handle the cement – you know quite well. Amidio Pepe would be a really great example of a producer who would be a really great example of a producer who would be a really great producer uh for um for cement aging. But here in Oregon, you know, if we're especially talking about Pinot Noir, just to keep it um consistent with the vessels' Pinot Noir and in the Willamette Valley, the chemistries aren't great.

And what I mean by that is even though we have you know relatively decent acidity that's naturally here, the soils mixed with the climate create pH problems. We have an extreme amount of rainfall. Uh, and so our soils are very anaerobic. We have a lot of leaching from heavy rain, the clay - all the soils here, all of them, all the series, all the different uh soil series are all heavy in clay. Um, there's a lot of potassium basically because you get a leaching of the soil and potassium builds up in the soil, and um, and so what I'm saying for people who are not necessarily chemistry trained here: the pH of wine, basically, the lower it is in value, numerical value, the fresher a wine will be.

So the brighter the fruit will be, the wine will be more linear it won't be it won't be as strong as the wine will be as broad. Okay, as pH goes up like water, just Gets flat, um, and so if you are trying to age Pinot Noir in cement, cement itself is calcareous in nature, right? So it's going to react with the pH and make the pH go up even more, right? So if you already have a pH issue, no matter where you are, what grape you're working with, or whatever the case be, you really need to have either very low naturally occurring pHs so that it can handle the buffering of the pHs and the pHs that are in capacity with the cement, or you need to be growing grapes that make wine so dense right, so powerful that it can just it can handle that interaction with the concrete.

So um, on the white fruit side of it there's definitely Much much more because of white wine being low pH in general, because you don't involve the skins with fermentation. White wine for me in the valley has a greater uh context or I think a greater result with with cement and there are a number of producers that are playing with that and looking at that with varying success. You have recently recently in cement it's actually super cool uh yes it's great, that's definitely a home run yeah uh but you know recently never has acidity problems so you know that's that's a that's a you know winner yeah I mean here it's one of the great varieties that we grow that does not have these chemistry challenges it's it's it does great here thrives so we're going to come back to you but we've been devoting way too much time to pinot noir for people that are dedicated to diversifying industry devoted you know disproportionately to it and zoe is playing along by drinking pinot gris uh in chinatown um uh let's talk cab bronc um you've made this delightful um you know the french say glue glue there are many different ways to say that but you know fresh carbonic uh cab bronc i have a picture uh you guys have a cool picture of uh one of the very blocks um of cab bronc i think that goes into uh this very wine that i scored online it's actually really cool uh uh it's not a not a bad office as it were um this looks like one of the loire valley clones um uh what's kind of the impetus behind this cab bronc and you know you told me the kind of story of this particular vintage uh that involved pinot noir essentially melting on the vine um you know what are you know a the problems of working with as much pinot as you do and you know the merits of a grape like cab bronc when it you know comes to the challenges that you face in the alignment can i answer that you go a little bit i just talked a lot i was getting distracted by the zoom chat there that's that's that's why it's So important, so he is, uh, I don't, I don't, I just uh, yeah, I maintain all attention on uh, on the video streams, I can't, I can't like this is too it's too much you know, yeah, that's a good sobriety test if you're that was great um, yeah, so that was uh one of the one of the three clones of uh Cabernet Franc that we work with um and it's a new clone uh to the Willamette Valley and it does come from the Loire Valley and so the two other clones are California clones, one is a California heirloom heritage clone um which where did it come from, it's unknown, it's the origins are unknown, it was nice yeah, it's very very old and back in the 50s and stuff When things were getting really going, uh stuff was coming from everywhere, wherever it had to come from, so we don't know. Yeah, but it's one of our favorites. Um, because it seems to have um just a lot of you know darkness and um spice to it, and and really interesting um you know characteristics, and the Loire clone that you saw there um definitely has um a little more of the sort of raspberry leaf and vibrancy that you kind of typically expand expect from you know Chinese and um and the Loire you know variety in clonal um varieties. So um we were what we were really trying to do with this was this was the first. Fruit off of those vines and, um, they were planted in 2016 and, um, we have that's where most of our uh, you know, alternative fruit comes from and, um, it's really been, you know, a great exploration of, of seeing how these varieties, um, work uh right from the beginning and uh not being grafted to Pinot Gris or other varieties that you know haven't sold so well for the farmers um so this this when we brought it into the cellar was really about us trying to understand what each clone gave us um and and how that expression came through in the wine and what we wanted to do with it and, you know, 2019 was also um a really Wet vintage, um, at the end of vintage, that's you know one of the unique things about Oregon is that it's still incredibly vintage-dependent from year to year, you know. You really have to understand, um, what kind of summer we had and most importantly when the rains came. Um, and so in 2019, the rains came in uh early September, like Labor Day, and they just really came, three or four days of rain, three or four days of sun, three or four days of rain, three or four days of sun. And so Pinot Noir was you know frantically being picked, it was melting on the vine because we'd had a warm summer, um, and it was ready to go, and our Cabernet Franc is just Still hanging out there, and so I'm out there, you know, trying to fruit harvest, and the ground is like muddy, and everyone's picking Pinot Noir frantically, and um, and our Cabernet Franc is just happily hanging out there through rainstorm and sun sunshine and rain and sunshine, and we finally ended up picking this right around Halloween, um, and so for us it had no botrytis, no rot, nothing; it was just completely yeah, and had a lot of flavor development even though it was only around 21 Brix, maybe 21 Brix when we brought it in, so for us, um, how did we get to this point where we were like, 'Oh my god, we're going to have to do this having' Flavor development at the end of the season and low alcohols is a real key to um having freshness, and which you know is combating that sort of higher pHs that naturally happen here.

And so um, for us this was like a home a big home run for us, thinking that yeah, we've done a right the right thing investing in Cabernet Franc as well. It's cool. You know what is problematic? You know, so you have 60 percent of the valley planted to Pinot, you know. In a year and you know, you have all these grapes that you know, have you know swollen, you know, beyond normal capacity because of a riper season. And then you know, you get these cycles of rain. Around harvest, and you know they're about to burst. You know what's the issue? If you know, everybody needs to harvest at the same time. 

So, so the issue with that is um, you know we have a constricting labor market here um, a lot of it is is based around immigrant labor as well um, and when you have everything being harvested at the same time, you have a lot of um people working very long hours in not the best conditions um especially, you know, muddy rainy you know soils um tractor work and things like that um, and you know so they're not getting very much time off during this time. They get paid, you know? You get paid by The bucket, which, but that is also you know it limits you so you can't say no to to a job right, so there were you know there were harvest crews working 24/7 during 2019, and then you also had you know vineyard contractors um you know offering people more money, you know five cents more a bucket, and stealing other people's labor as well, um, and then you know the wineries here are only a certain size so you have all of this fruit coming in at the same time and it's just getting congested and bottlenecked, and so you're putting things in reefers and they're you know trying to keep them cold and intact and they're going moldy and so the Seller staff are working really long hours as well, and it's just, it's not um, it's not a sustainable, it's not a socially responsible and socially sustainable um business option for me to to invest in, in strictly one great variety here. It's flat out dangerous, it's not I'm not kidding, it's a bad idea, well, and it's funny too.

Chad, you were speaking to you know, for you, you feel like you know Pino's been planted to a lot of sites in Oregon where it doesn't necessarily belong. So the Willamette Valley is over three million square acres, okay, and I don't know for sure, I might be lying here but I think if you took pretty much all the major regions wine regions of france and cut out all the non-grape growing stuff you could probably fit it all in valley right like this place is huge and there it's just covered with hillsides i mean the the topography of the land here is infinitely complex and complicated and it basically affords us to essentially have what i would consider like an ava like let's just say down the road we could have the dundee hills could basically be like that's where we decided that's going to be chardonnay right like this whole nonsense of all the ava separating themselves from each other growing the same grape there's legitimacy to It for sure, but like I think down the road would be more interesting as if Pinot Noir was just in the Yola Hills and Chardonnay was here and Cabernet Franc was there and Chenin Blanc was here and we kind of start to actually sort of get a little bit more into the terroir and be a little bit more specific because it's a big enough place to be able to do that so basically what I'm trying to say is I think it's silly to have any one, any one grape, I'm not talking about Pinot Noir here, I'm just conceptually like any one single grape to be the dominant grape within the Willamette Valley doesn't work in terms of quality.

argument because you're going to have great wine in some spots, you're going to have a lot of really bad wine in places where it probably shouldn't have been planted, and then you'll have a lot of sort of you know average stuff in between. And we see even on a much smaller region just within Burgundy alone which is way smaller than the Willamette Valley - we see that same exact tier there's great stuff, there's bad stuff, and there's stuff in the middle. And that place is way more well understood. Much smaller. I think that diversity here for the sake of branding Oregon or the Willamette Valley as quality not as 'oh this grape' or whatever. Are these things right? We can brand the Willamette Valley as people saying 'wow' like Willamette Valley wines are amazing.

I'm cool if it's Chardonnay and Blanc, I'll try the Cab Franc, I don't really care because it's quality, right? So, if we kind of get away from this sort of one-grape identity and we drive the quality message and the diversity message, and the labor market right, we're going to have a lot of diversity, and we're going to have a lot of you know what. We can stretch harvest out to 10-12 weeks opposed to having it be done in two with peanut oil so it can be healthier work environments, I mean massive benefits, right? Trucks not smashing. the highways here constantly with you know huge loads of grapes and causing traffic problems and like you know i mean it's just we're we're really kind of forcing this narrative and there's it's causing a lot of problems as the industry is getting bigger and we're starting to really really see that now yeah and we need you know we need to be thinking about the future of our industry here from a from a labor perspective as well and if we can't offer people full-time salaried contract positions in the vineyard um then they're gonna they're gonna go to other careers and that's what we're seeing they're going to construction they're going to you know things that are more consistent for them instead of you know pushing them into this very stressful you know four to six week period um instead we need you know if if we have multiple varieties planted in the same vineyard you have a pruning you know you're going to have a lot of variety and you're going to have a lot of you know calendar that lasts you know it's very protracted the same with the ripening conditions and the picking conditions and then you have a sustainable industry you know that's good for everyone involved not just the land owners you know i also feel like you're a lot you know better Protected when Sideways Two comes out and Paul Giamatti suddenly shit talks Pinot Noir instead of Merlot, and you guys are fucked, so you know. I mean, wine friends, wine trends are so fickle and schedules are so protracted that you know diversifying is never a bad thing. Uh, so what do the chatters have to say about uh all the things? A lot of great questions I'm going to kind of work backwards um just due to uh a good segue one might say. Could you talk a little bit more about labor rights um in Willamette Valley?

I think that's something that's so important, that we don't necessarily think of as not only the equity within. The wine industry, but also from the cultural point um, and then therefore also, if you could talk a little bit about mechanization and technology, and how it's increased, particularly from your perspective being in Australia, that has like led mechanization for decades at this point, so you're on point with the question all the hard-hitting questions. Sorry, Brie, next question. Um, so mechanization here is has has been slower to be adopted because of the size of the vineyard models, so it's expensive to purchase an over-row machine harvester and you have to have a certain amount of acreage that that makes sense.

For um, because we have an industry here that's primarily um, small small estates that you know are not really managed or farmed by the people who own them; they're farmed by um vineyard um, it's those vineyard management companies that are starting to invest in some of the machine harvesting because they can pencil it out over their um, you know book of clients. And so that's the larger um, vineyard management companies who are you know, sort of going in that direction; but primarily it's still a lot of um, hand harvesting here because it's affordable um, even though the challenges of labor are are very real um, and becoming increasingly. Realer uh, but the mechanization that's happening is more just in the terms of the mechanical hedging, the mechanical de-leafing when you go through the row with a really large, you know, fan blower and blow off the leaves.

Um, that's the type of mechanization that's happening, things that are affordable for vineyards or um smaller vineyard management companies to purchase. Um, that said, you know, there is there are a couple of of um bigger companies here who who are investing in the machine harvesters um, but those grapes are generally not going into premium quality wine, you know, and that's what Oregon makes, it is premium. Priced um premium quality wine because you can't really farm here, um, at very high crop levels to get a lot of very ripe fruit, um, you are limited to, you know, two to three tons an acre, you know, it's, it's a third of what it is in California, um, so, so the economics of it is, is very real as well and then, you know, thirdly, we're all planted on hillsides here, so if you have a quality vineyard, you're on a hillside, and it's, you know, pretty extreme to have yeah, a big machine going down these um, these pretty steep hillsides when um, you know, you've had some rain starting, you know, you're just not going to be investing in that type of machinery. um unless you're on the flats or have you know a pretty safe um work environment and also your grapes are going into lesser priced wines yep heard that um could you talk a little bit more about um the bricks level and what like 21 being quite low but put that on a scale and how that relates to different grapes and then what also um determines when you will pick if you're um if you're going to be investing in strictly bricks oriented or if there are other artistic or other scientific choices that come into play yeah so um bricks level is a level of the sugar in the grapes and you can basically think of it as um 21 bricks is really About 11 alcohol, no, so, so generally, you know there's there's there's a number of variables, but the the average rule of thumb is to multiply the bricks by 0.5 7, and that'll get you your rough alcohol within a couple of tenths uh plus or minus um, so 21 whatever, by you know 0.57 is just a little bit over 12 alcohol, um, so I mean like we could literally like do a massive lecture on this question it's a lot of things but so what we're what we're producing are wines that are fermented and produced just using the fruit and some sulfur to keep them tasting good because we don't like you know overly natty wine, um, and so the concept basically is that we are trying to we are trying to ripen a range of different grape varieties within the window of time that we know that the climate here will allow for fruit ripening and so some things are going to come in at the very end of the season barely make it across the finish line and their bricks are going to be low and we can't do shit about it because it's like we're done like the season is done right like fruit's got to come off the vine it's over so there is no there's really no decision making at all to be honest the weather is truly you know what determined determining okay now on the earlier side of things for something Like Pinot Gris for example, or uh Miller Thurgau, or some of the earlier rampant white grape varieties for example, that we work with those ones were really largely looking at making sure we're preserving the acidity so we're really looking at making sure we're preserving the acidity so we're not worried about the bricks too much, we're just keeping an eye on the acid and trying to make sure that the acid stays nice and vibrant, so you know it really depends on what what the conditions are and what we're looking at um when it comes to grape varieties that might tend to have um a sort of a significant amount of of alcohol accumulation.

We might choose to say, 'Okay, you know what? For Pinot Noir, we're under I don't care what the condition is, but we're going to make sure that we can say okay. We're doing just fine; we're going to make sure that we can have line is that and if you don't know what the conditions are, doesn't matter. It's not going over 22 and a half or something like that, right? So with Pinot Noir, we're definitely much much more chemistry-driven, and basically I think what that says to me, to us, and hopefully I think to you guys is that it's possibly too warm to grow that grape variety here. Like once you kind of get into um, once you kind of get into a stage where You are putting bricks limitations on stuff, looking at a great variety that shouldn't probably shouldn't be planted there anymore, um whether you know, let's just say it's like a specific vineyard and it's just warm or whatever.

I don't want to try and talk about the whole valley, but like you might say, okay well shoot, you know if if for some reason and I also don't want to talk about global warming, but if for some reason we're starting to have to make these decisions based on chemistries, we should probably be changing what we're doing so it could be like, okay let's just take pinot noir up another 500 feet. In elevation, you know the average vineyards here are planted between 300 and 500 most of them, and so it's rare to go beyond five and so it's like okay, well can we fix this issue by going up in the hills? Well, yeah, we can because we have lots of lots of hills, but most of the hills that are here max out at like maybe 1,500 feet or less.

So there will be a period of time potentially where you can't just fix it with elevation right um so it's very important when we're looking at the vineyards that we work with the farmers that we've partnered with that we look at their land and we think okay, based on what we know from the Pinot Noir next door To you right, we should probably plant these great varieties that are going to be you know in favor essentially of sort of correcting that imbalance uh just by making the right decision and putting the right fruit in the ground or saying okay well if you really insist on Pinot Noir how about selling this property and buying another one 500 feet higher in elevation this mountain over here or whatever and we'll be happy to help you, you know like or in 100 years in the Cascades or uh yeah yeah I mean who knows right so so it's it's very complicated so like the question basically like sometimes we have to pick one acid sometimes.

We have to pick on bricks because we just put a max, sometimes we have to pick because the weather says you're done, um, and because we have such diversity it's it's it's it's much more organized I hope than it appears but we have so many great varieties that it it's going to inform us right, we're not informing the land like the work we've done is literally progressive enough and out there far enough in front of us that it's informing us um, and so every single year we'll we'll know more yeah, and I mean there's a lot of traditions that people stick to as well, so the conversation, you know, you'll be walking a vineyard with a winemaker.

Or whatever, and they're looking at the vines and you know they're used to the you know one and a half clusters you know per shoot or you know like so the the typical two two to two and a half you know two tons an acre um for premium fine wine well if you can ripen more than that then why wouldn't you and make your vineyard more economical but that's a battle that vineyard owners are having against you know winemakers um that adjustment period of of what what you know gives you quality wine um and so there's there's a whole yeah that was a really big bag of questions that we keep going into that's a lifelong journey for most winemakers And, and you know I think too, you know, the greatest winemakers are the ones that you know they will, you know, kind of um, judge their intuition, you know, they will scientifically, you know, suss these choices out, but you know at the end of the day they're tasting, you know, they're tasting grapes, they're tasting seeds, you know, and they're, you know, basing their decisions primarily on that because that's what wine is, is all about at the end of the day. And then I think too, an important thing to understand is that I actually really like this quote I got from David Left, he said uh great growing in Western Oregon, he said this in the 60's.

Is an adventure the climate of Western Oregon, um, uh, constitutes the risk um and also the reason for this adventure and I like that idea, the risk and the reason because the greatest things you know in life as in wine happen in the margins and the margins are fucking hard, you know. Um, you know, in marginal climates you're gonna lose a vintage or you know, in law, you're gonna make sparkling wine, you know, you're, you know there is, you know potential failure there that people are afraid of, but you know I think that potential barrier creates a larger ripening window and you know, more time for physiological development. Of the fruit and makes you know, greater wine at the end of the day.

And the greatest wine regions the world are the ones that are, you know, ripening grapes at their margins, and you know, and that's that's the gold, you know, um, yeah, and that's the stress of it all for you guys which fucking sucks but you know that's also, you know, that's the secret sauce. It's also the, it's also the adrenaline, it's you know, it's it's it boosts the love for us of our work because of that element. I mean there's a, there's a, there's a long history of sort of renegade people coming to Oregon and making wine, and the pioneers especially David. Let's certainly one of them right, I mean these people have grit right, like they, they, they had a they could they could take a lot of pain and kind of get through it right because they, they loved they believed in it and they loved it well.

Also Charles Curry's master's thesis was on the Amelior Cool Climate Amelioration Theory sir I just read about that today dude, and then they made him rewrite it yeah yeah that's if you ever want to talk about that we could talk about that on a separate side it's a very it's a very that's like that's going to be that's the appendix to this uh that's like uh that's a deeper dive we'll keep that we'll Keep that in the footnotes for the time being, Chad, yeah, so um, so he was a brilliant man, um, and he wrote uh his uh PhD thesis uh I believe it was his PhD thesis um that he finished and he was um studying and working at the University of Colmar in France and Alsace and he has a bachelor's or a master maybe it's the master's that's climatology from UCLA so he was a climatologist and fell in love with wine and the idea of wine and and decided he wanted to do his PhD and so he combined his climatology education with wine research and basically wrote something that may have already existed but I think he defined it, I think that thesis was Like defining cold climate amelioration theory, basically the one sentence elevator pitch of what that thesis says is: um, the grapes that you grow in any given region should ripen right at the very end of the season, like the last day or two or whatever it is of sunshine, whatever it is you have, that's the grape that you should plant; it should line up right with the end of the season.

Now part problem goes to the same thing as what Brie's saying, which is: like, well then we have the same labor problems, right? And we said then we have all these other issues so if we actually have some bandwidth, you know, like okay I get that, that's awesome but let's not push everything to the maximum I mean you're not you're not you know you're not trying for a home run with every wine either you know some you know sometimes you just want to drink the you know viticultural equivalent of Toccata you know and then and then and then sometimes you want you know a transcendental altering experience you know but sometimes the familiar you know the glue is good too yeah so I'm gonna I'm gonna switch gears because I think that's a great segue for the sake of actually my favorite wine in this lineup which we've yet to uh address here and I had a I had a oh I had a killer picture Uh, but uh, that is a Shannon talk about uh your your Shannon Blanc here because I think it's very different than you know what most people will be used to for the sake of Shannon Blanc. So this for us uh from this particular vintage was um probably the most exciting wine that we produced in that vintage and the reason why was because it felt like we really came up with a defining result of Oregon or Willamette Valley Shannon Blanc.

It doesn't taste like any Shannon Blanc from anywhere else, you can certainly make correlations and like find things in it, you know, that I mean, because it's Shannon Blanc, so there's some Varietal characteristics and things like that, but I feel like that wine um sheds all this like nonsense of like referencing you know the Loire Valley or referencing Burgundy or referencing Bordeaux or whatever. This is f***ing like kick-ass Oregon Willamette Valley Shanhan Blanc, like that's what the wine feels like to me. And you know, I don't like this sort of mimicry, I hear do um with their Pinot Noir and constantly referencing Burgundy because we are way more mature than that. Like I understand that that was really important in the early days and it's always still a point of reference and it's important but we should.

shed that and really be talking more and more and owning more and more of the style of wine that we make here and this for me was a great example of us making shannon blanc for the first time doing the best that we can with our knowledge and making the best decisions we possibly can and and and and and and and and and and and and and on farming on all of these things to try to produce a true willamette valley shannon blanc and we feel like this wine represents that and that for us is extremely exciting because that kind of represents the pinnacle of our work just the experience of the wine you know not all these other things but just the wine itself if somebody tries that wine and says oh my god like yeah what is this and how yeah like what like you know what i mean and then it's kind of and then we sort of see a consistent sort of expression of that thing and then it becomes sort of a benchmark that's not based off of europe it's a benchmark based off of an experiment conducted here in the long valley that's pretty that's pretty exciting that is that's awesome uh so your fruits um you know at harvest uh and harvest um if i'm if the notes uh online october october 12th you know look something like this um uh and and yes for you at home you're drinking this uh it's Just the blue cheese of the blue cheese of wine, um, so what are they, what are they drinking on October 12th, this uh this like home run you know kind of swing for the fences wine, so this is this is betrides that you know the same conversation that we had earlier about the Cabernet Franc hanging through the rain, um you can see that Sémillon Blanc is like pretty tight, um you can see that Ortega Desoppamente yeah but you can where you know there were so many Spoilers, um a good g oh um um um you know yeah this is this is getting pretty gnarly you need to get this and this is like a month before we're picking it yeah and they're just freaking out like because they haven't been through it yet right they haven't you know their stomach's not quite as they're expecting that we're gonna you know it's gonna get to the winery and we're gonna reject half of it because it's got rot and we're like no no we want all of we want all of this so uh bear with us yeah so they're they're getting used to us but it's still um you know we might we might just give them like little packs of valium or something when it comes to harvest for us it's an experiment for everybody even the people just watching us do what we do it's it's an experiment for everybody yeah you got to have a strong stomach For it, and then you know the vinification on this one is pretty classic, isn't it not very simple, yeah it's just old uh neutral front choke barrels um we didn't want to press as well, we pressed it for like eight hours because you know the grapes are, you know there's not a heap of juice in them so we definitely lost um you know some wine but you know because of the botrytis, you know eating eating up the eating up the juice there, but uh it was a really slow press and then a really slow fermentation as well um but it charged on through, I mean what was this, brick's when we picked it, it's like 26, well the botrytis concentrated it so the grapes.

Themselves didn't actually have a natural sugar that high, so we saw a concentration effect. But it wasn't 26; it was just under 24, I think I want to say because what does the alcohol say on the bottle bill? Is it like 13/8? We declared 13.7 to the relevant local authorities, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So um, so that should be fairly true. So if it was, like, yeah, a bird 23 is close to 24, but anyway um, quite you know, quite intense for our area. And even with Pinot Noir, unless it's a warm year, 24 is a pretty tough benchmark to get to. Um, so yeah, definitely definitely a lot of concentration and um, you know, for the most part, whenever we make.

A wine from a like a single grape variety, when the purpose is to understand the grape variety itself, the winemaking is very, very simple and straightforward because we don't want to, we don't want to confuse or gloss over any details with wood or funky winemaking techniques or anything, kind of you know what I mean? Like, we want to get a real true sense just a really naked true sense of what it is, so that we can then think, 'Oh, this could be really cool in cement,' or maybe we, you know, like and you kind of sort of take steps to um from there. So, what we have noticed with the Chenin Blanc is, and one of the reasons why we planted it initially Is it's a chameleon, you know it can make a number of really noble styles of wines from dessert sweet, you know like a mole you like an amazing mole, you for example uh, or it could make uh, really kick-ass like sparkling wine, it could make dry botrytis wine, it can make dry wine with no botrytis, like it's a grape that can make excellent wine through many different expressions and so with the margins right, we have flexibility, so if one vintage we're like, okay, there's no botrytis, it's just hot as hell, Chenin Blanc's getting ripe, maybe it'll taste a little bit more like a South African you know style in that vintage and then in the vintages where we are getting good botrytis it's just hot as hell chenin blanc's getting ripe it'll taste more like this and and if we have a vintage where for some reason it's just really cold and we also don't get botrytis at all and it's just not ripening too much we always have sort of plan you know so we have backup plans like all right well this one's gonna be bubbly this year but overall we would like to try to see it be a you know fairly consistent kind of product and we do think that based on the couple of vintages we've had now working with it that will most likely be able to consistently produce enough botrytis Regularly to make something like this, which we really love, it's awesome, it's really cool, and it was really the vintage that you know allowed us to do this again and us to have that conversation. I mean, we definitely had the sparkling Chenin conversation when the rain started in September.

We were like, 'Oh, I guess we're making sparkling wine because this wine is a you know 16 bricks in September.' Um, so, and then you know, we thought about it and thought, 'Okay, like where does where do great botrytis wines come from? And what does this wine look like with it's like you made Zinn Nubrecht in in like the Willem yeah yeah yeah'. Who doesn't want that, all right? I'm gonna give give it a quick toast and a bit of verse, but Zoe has all the questions if you guys still have time to hang out to address more of them. But um, this is a John Dunn, I said this around we were talking, you know kind of New California wines and and I emailed this, but I thought it particularly kind of relevant in the sense that you know, I think you know, I think you know there's so many new world wine regions that are searching for a brand and you know, to its credit, Oregon, well the Willamette Valley, um, in particular, you know they have that, but again it's it's always that gift and a curse. Thing, um, and you know I think, uh, you know the thing I love most about your projects is you know this like restless desire to innovate and this, you know, just kind of um own a file's wanderlust, you know. You love wine; you want to engage it, you know, at a very personal, very local level but in the spirit of, you know, a world of ideas that you're equally plugged into so, uh, in this poem John Dunn says, uh, water stinks soon if in one place they bide and in that vast sea are more putrefied; but when they kiss one bank and leaving this never look back, but the next bank do kiss the hearty, uh, change indeed; the nursery of great wine and, hopefully. A better feature for the Willamette Valley wine industry, so uh, cheers to you all in the Willamette, cheers you all joining at home, cheers to you and Chinatown's out alone together as always, so lit. Cheers particularly distraught that Zoe usually picks up, uh, we pay her in wine at this point because she's not on the official payroll. The Shenanigans is a killer Chinese food wine it wants like it wants, like day-old Leinenkugel, which is the best. Um, but you know I just want to like you know stumble into like a carton in the fridge and you know happen to be drinking this well. I you know being from Melbourne and we have a very um awesome um dim Sum scene Melbourne has like an awesome everything scene, but I'm always I'm always striving to make the best dim sum wine because that's what I know I'm doing as soon as I go back to Australia and I have bottles in hand of my own wine. Uh, Zoe questions hit us absolutely um, I love that your your um vision is to me um, you talk a little bit um, we've talked so much about um, kind of the set of station of Pinot Noir in Willamette Valley and if you know Noir shouldn't be planted in all of these places, what are the other grapes that you think will have the future um, that's a great question. Yeah, and then there was also a great question of if there was any native varieties particularly american or hybrid grapes as well so you killed the question today yeah i don't think there were any native americans yeah really geeky questions i love it um i don't think there were any native american varieties grown or found over on the west coast i think they're primarily east coast wines we have a different it's a different it's a different world over here um you know you think it's you think you make wine in a temperate rain forest there but um you know i don't want to i don't want to pack the global warming thing but climate change especially in the mid-atlantic has bought Brought us a more moisture, and be more extreme, um, you know rain events. So, there are a lot of really thoughtful people that are thinking, if we're going to make, you know, any halfway decent wine, then we need to make wine that, you know, is addressing an issue of disease pressure that you can't address the disease pressure that you can't address with Vinifera here.

Um, uh, so um, there are a lot of, you know, really thoughtful people, both, you know, in places as far along as Maryland and Vermont, you know, thinking about how to make halfway decent Vinifera or non-Vinifera wine. Like, so far for me it only really works as Pet Nat, like it's fun as pet nat um and um you know it only really works if you go into it expecting something that doesn't taste like you know quote unquote fine wine you know if you're expecting to go to ppld you know great you know amazing like wine flavor town and you taste a hybrid wine you're not you're not going to go there but if you're open-minded and you just want like something delicious then yeah like it could work so this is going to be not so much a secret anymore but i have a secret desire to make norton and it's so cool um we so norton developed by a grieving doctor of the same name in virginia um really old vine source material in missouri Home to America's first AVA, um, we have Norton at both restaurants; um, actually, the former Washingtonian, um, restaurant critic wrote the foremost book on the Norton grape and on the um role that um a lot of American rootstock played in the uh revival of the European uh industry post-Balakshma. So we solved the problem that we created in true American fashion, um, and um, um.

but uh it's a fascinating grape um it it's a it's a monster man it's it's like it's so high acid and it's so it's it's like to not it like stains the glass like you can't like literally you have to like run you have to like wash the glasses by hand or something like it's wild it's wild stuff but it's it's fun have you had any like really like killer norns i had yeah i did have one that was pretty good i had one that was pretty good i had one that was pretty good i can't remember the name of it but i can see the label in my mind um so catherine mcleod here she she runs a label called chrysalis her labels are terrible they have these like little fairies on them it looks like some kind of teenage girls like bedroom fantasy but i love it label um but she makes some really good wine um it's it's the vinifer the non-vinifers are just hard they're hard to work with yeah but you know what as as an australian Who has zero native species of of vines that I can work with? If I were American, that's what I would be wanting to play with. These are these are our grapes, you know. This is this country's grapes, like that. Reminds me a little bit of my favorite quote from The Naked Gun, which is um, some people say our problems don't amount to a hill of beans, but this is our hill and these are our beans.

So I feel like I feel like you know sometimes the fact that it's native doesn't like isn't always enough, you know. Um, but I admire, I admire your spirit of uh, American exceptionalism in in in your winemaking. I have hope, I have high hopes so we um, we Do you have some crossings in Oregon, okay? So Vinifera Vinifera cross with Vinifera Um, one of them is an American invention, uh, it's called Flora. Have you ever heard of it, Bill? No, they sound like, uh, those are great. There are a lot of those in South America; it's like Criolla. They say Criolla grapes, like all the Torronteses are Criollas, and they're like there's not one Torrontese or a bunch of them and almost all of them suck, but you know, you know, neither here nor there, but uh, there's there's a lot of that down there because actually, I mean, they have a longer history with Vinifera than than we do here uh in Oregon, so I think That's a good point, but I know, yeah.

So, Flora was developed at UC Davis by Dr. Olmo, uh, and Charles Corey was an adjunct professor at UC Davis at the time and did a lot of work with Dr. Olmo, so some of the plant material that Charles Corey planted at David Hill in the 1960s, uh, was stuff that he got from working with Dr. Olmo. So we actually have, uh, plantings of that at David Hill, um, which is pretty cool and and I don't know if I think there's a tiny like some supposedly there's a very very small amount of acreage of it in California that's like you know an odd sort of... is it New Zealand? Yeah, okay so New Zealand, so yeah, so The there's a lot of cross-research done right with Dr. Olmo and um, a couple of um, I can't remember the names of them; Harry Olmo was the um professor who who brought um, went a clone Chardonnay to Margaret River and identified Margaret River as a wine-growing region, the Western Australian government had brought him over, kind of like the Willamette Valley of Australia. It's kind of is yeah, it's closer to the coast but yeah, it's definitely all of those maritime influences right out of the way, yep, yeah, the weather, yeah, it's like it's like all the way over here um, so, so what are the what are the hot so like 30 years from now um, you? Know Pinot Noir hopefully doesn't constitute 60% of your plannings, you know what is the burgeoning you know so, is it Pinot Gris, is it Trousseau, is it Gamay?

What's the like the new hotness? I mean, I think, I think the Gamay is showing a lot of potential; it seems to hold its acidity quite well. Um, and it seems you know, I hate to say this, but it runs with the Burgundian theme. You know, you're not going to upset people too much; yeah, the local producers can add it to their to their menu right because it doesn't change; it's not like they're making Syrah-Velt all of a sudden, although all of the French producers that are investing here are. going to be really pissed if they have to start working with Gamay where it's going to be like a Charlemagne or something coming out, because we know no Gamay yeah.

And then same thing with Aligoté uh, so six years ago, uh, myself and a team that I was working with at the time, we planted the very first Aligoté, and then we planted the very first Aligoté in the Willamette Valley, and now there's like 20 plantings right. So I mean it's, it's that one's definitely a real thing, I mean you're going to start seeing uh, well maybe you won't see it unless you look for it, but you'll start seeing at least two dozen different versions of Aligoté uh. From producers in the Willamette Valley, very soon which is exciting. Um, I think that the uh Austrian varieties are really exceptional here. Um, I've worked in Australia a couple of times and there's um, there's old Grünewald leaner plantings here from the late 70s, yeah.

Um, yeah, that were suitcase in and it is phenomenal. Are you gonna make like Schmarach? Are you gonna make like, you know, massive? Like that would be amazing. I'm I'm on board for that. Actually, no we're we're uh over cropping it and putting into one liter screw top bottles. I'm into that too. I'm literally perfect for dim sum though. Let's remove let's remove. Riesling, okay, um, and just automatically assume anything burgundy and Sopino, Sopino, green Chardonnay, um. If you were to look at alternative white grape varieties, Grüner Veltliner is one of the most commonly planted of the sort of oddities and it has a real contention for like the heavyweight title, um. If we figure it out and we, you know, get the volume up enough to get people to be aware that it exists and everything because it's really, really great and I have experimented uh over the years with uh Saint Laurent as well and Zweigelt, Blau Frankisch, and they all do great here. Blau Frankisch here is probably, I mean Blau Frankisch. Is probably the most solid red grape variety that I've worked with on, uh, these soils here in the Lemon Valley. Yes, um, and so it's kind of like, okay, well if we were to say, okay, Blau Frankisch is really amazing, okay, um, and I think that it should be more widely planted than Pinot Noir and we should just keep the Pinot Noir focused on where it should be, where it is amazing in the world. Are we ready for for us to champion Blau Frankisch on a major scale? I don't know, call it Lemberger, just call it yeah, one of the first Washingtons already failed at that.

So there are approximately 80 different grape varieties planted in the Lemon Valley, Nate. Jones and Selena Espinell are adding probably another 10 to that equation, nice farm uh called Consonitis, and so the list is growing, so I think the biggest problem is that we don't have a lot of grape varieties that are planted in the Lemon Valley. The biggest thing to take away from this conversation is the number of grape varieties we could grow here and make good quality wine, well beyond 100. What we can make great mind-blowing wine with is probably still two dozen, yeah but that's that's only probably I mean, that is the you know it takes generations upon generations, it took Cistercians like you know centuries to figure That's not fair, that like is beyond me, I don't know, I don't know the scope of any single person's lifetime, you know, and it takes like, you know, a bunch of different data points and you know they've had you know all the years to suss that out in the old world so um, you know, we're doing the best that we can, yeah. So we have Americans only know maybe a dozen grape varietals, our chats at least a solid but 24 is great to make it excellent and to make the um specifications of the microclimates in Willamette Valley would be beautiful, yeah. So you know we have research I call them research stations because it's what I want to call them, and I want everybody to know that we have research stations, uh, and what is it, five of the eight? Five of the eight major AVAs, yeah!

One of the research stations already existed because David Hill all the original vine materials there, and Charles Corey was very experimental, and so there's a bunch of stuff there like the flora and um, and so we have that one that has nothing to do with me other than I currently work there now, and then uh, we have Nate and Salima's property which is uh coming online this year and that's in the Yamhill-Carlton district; we have Shahala Mountains AVA which Is where Shahala Mountain Vineyard is, which was originally Dick Era's original vineyard in the 1960s. Uh, and there's a plethora of stuff that we have at Saint Laurent there and Blah Francus there, and a bunch of Gamay and other things there.

Greenerville leaner, uh, and then we have Johan and we have Eola Springs which is in the Yellow Hills, Ava, and we have um, the potential to um expand hopefully into Ribbon Ridge and into a couple of others so that we can try to actually have what we would call sort of these research station-ish kind of idea, sort of concept vineyards, and each of the AvAs with some of the great varieties being planted. At all of them, but then all of them also having some great varieties that aren't planted at the other ones with the idea that if we at least have a half a dozen things that are consistent that'll give us our point

of reference right so that we can measure those things off of each other but then also see how successful are these other experimental gay varieties that are on the individual parcels um and they all have different soil types by the way too um so we're covering all the soil types and all the different avas and we only need I think two or three more avas and so if any of you would like to uh move invest in a farm in the long valley give us a call this is actually this whole thing is actually just an investor's presentation like that's the sole purpose of mind-school at the end of the day um and what else do you have for us oh oh talking about investment great amazing Sagley um could you talk a little bit more about european and asian investment in the willamette valley yeah i mean we've seen a ton of um european investment in the last decade yeah really since sort of the that was it was baked in i mean dry and invested really early drew on did invest really early um but they were really the only ones to do so until sort of really the mid mid 2000s Yeah, I mean there were French people coming here to work and to live and stuff, but in terms of like French-owned and having a significant population of French-owned, yeah it's really been more over the last probably 15, 15 15 years, yeah um and they are definitely uh you know coming approaching winemaking the same way and as they do in Burgundy and maybe not having the most success with it so it's a good learning curve for them as well um it's very different you know the soils the climate everything is incredibly different here um but the one reason that they are coming here is because Oregon. Is kind of unique in the U.S. in that if you have a vineyard and winery here or production here, you actually are um an importer as well, so they can all direct import all of their wines. It's like a church course and bypass the milk and stuff, and they have they have access to the largest D2C (you know) channel in the world you know the U.S. is the largest wine drinking market. It doesn't matter how much they can make a case or two and then bring in – yeah, literally. Yeah, and I'd love to say they're coming here because it's so Burgundian, but I'm cynical, so I think people people like to assume the best of like the Burgundians, but you know they're just as cynical if not more so than the rest of us um is there is there like a significant asian market for uh willamette wine japan is pretty well known um it's our largest export market outside of canada oh fascinating yeah i mean there's a huge there's a like a huge natural wine scene in in japan in particular um oh yeah it's a fascinating palette too like they uh they're not afraid of moussey wines like uh talk to a lot of winemakers who like have really moussey wines and they're like fallback is just to japan because like they're it's like for whatever reason the palette over there it's just like i i don't know i to suzuka Who, with her father, runs an izakaya here, and she was always saying that, like, Japanese people are very invested in process so they find the process really fascinating in a way that, like, sometimes trumps the end result.

Um, it's a really fascinating market though, yeah. It's funny because I actually we just had this conversation last night as well, i.e., I had a um soy sauce that a barrel-aged soy sauce that was incredibly smoky, and then that led me into a conversation about smoke-impacted wines sales in Japan and whether that they would approach that differently, you know, whether it would be seen as such a taint. as it as it is here um yeah so i had that conversation last night because you know i think that they have such an approach to fermentation and they've grown up with so many different fermentation flavors that there's nothing that's i guess foreign to them they don't joke about it like you know they i think they see they see like most americans see the picture of the tripe guys grapes and they're horrified that they're drinking the the juice of that you know the japanese get excited about it yeah like a cross-culture i mean like a cross-culture too the koreans get even more excited about it especially if you know you you I know, yeah, like throw it in the kimchi pot or whatever, like it's it's I don't know, I we're, I mean America's a weird place too because we have you know it's a nation of immigrants, um and you know there's not a unified food culture, and there's certainly not a unified food culture around fermentation, yeah, yeah, I mean and if you, you know I'm not a, I'm not an expert on this by any means, okay but I've been in Japan and I've gone to the old restaurants and had you know natto right and you know some really borderline, you know eatable things for my palate which is very, I'm very open to eating pretty much anything and and I've been lucky enough to eat well and across cultures and things like that but there are some things man i tell you that for me are like you know tough tough to kind of enjoy and so their culture yeah like you said so their flavor their palate like what they eat is it just it completely changes the game of how they're going to perceive something and what they'll they'll be okay with you know they're like they're like the maverick of the food they're they're unsafe you know they're not afraid to be unsafe you know it's like to they're the maverick to america's ice man you know we want everything you know to be safe and you know the The you know the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the no skies of food and they're you know content to explore the margins which is like again where all the interesting shit happens but sometimes yeah but sometimes like you know you eat some shit that you wish you hadn't or or in my case, like you become the tester for you know at the restaurant whether the sea urchin has gone bad or not and you know that's never a good place to be because it rots from the inside so um, so what else you got is there is there a bingo going on movie quote names because so we have a very hardcore uh group of pens and there's a bingo attached. to certain like uh things that i'll say over the course of the lesson that uh so there's like this private we have yet to reach like rocky horror show levels of people throwing stuff at their computer terminals but i feel like if we give it enough lessons we might get there um i will not be dressing up like tim curry and anything like that so i'm not going to be dressing up like tim curry and i'm not going to be in any event but uh yeah it's it's uh frank and frodo's it's an amazing it's an amazing group of people uh are you not going to be dressing up like tim curry because you do look like rocky though which which one's rocky the one In gold lamay, yeah I don't have the body for that so maybe like 10 years ago, like especially post-pandemic no that was spot on Zoe, that's perfect. I just don't, I don't have the body for that. We have a very important question for you, Chad, if you've come around to enjoying beer at this point of your life or Venus Vinipra or Bus for you, yeah so I did start drinking beer eventually uh when I kind of got later into college so uh you know I was kind of one of the people that went to college for you know eight years, probably should have had a PhD and i get you know I walked out of there with a bachelor's but um I would say around around the age Of 24/25, is when I first started drinking beer and I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm gonna be drinking beer for the first kind of finally started and the reason I think why I was turned off by beer in the beginning is because the very first beers that were being shown to me by friends were like these hop monster-like, you know, just super offensive, like, try my idea yeah yeah. So I just couldn't - I couldn't do it, you know? It was just like, I knew I needed to start with Coors Light and kind of build my way up, you know what I mean. And so um, what ended up happening eventually was um, in the last year that I was in college in Fresno, I started working at a wine Liquor, beer retail shop, and so uh, so I started doing some beer tastings and stuff like that, you know, um, working with customers and talking to people about beer, and so then I started trying other styles of beer and eventually found, like oh, like I really like lagers or this pilsner is really cool or okay, you know, and um, and then started to essentially buy; I was able to buy like individual bottles of beer without having to invest in like a six-pack or whatever at the time because the store was yeah, the store was really cool about selling individual bottles if people wanted or whatever, they were very very um democratic and so. On a college budget too, allowed me to try a lot of beers so I actually did try many beers through like a period of a year where I probably didn't drink very much wine, I was actually more interested in beer and started thinking more and more and more about this idea about recognizing that I think I'm really in love with flavor more than I'm really in love with the flavor of the I'm in love with wine or food or beer I'm just obsessed, I love flavor.

And so once I started getting it and I had people coaching me a bit and I had this really great beer selection that was progressive at the time, that Russian River, you know, brewing beers and And things like that, I started understanding balance in beer and over-the-top styles of beer, like the way we have oaky wine or you know whatever right, the same kind of stuff. And then I really, really had an appreciation for it. And then over the years I started settling into certain styles and certain styles of beer. And then I started getting into the world where I would drink more frequently from. And then I would say, over the last probably five to seven years, I've struggled with the American brewing culture because they sort of did what Napa did 20 years ago, where like it's just like how much hops can we put in these beers?

Know and then everything started getting really sweet because in brewing, my understanding is one of the best ways to balance bitterness and beer is by um controlling your extract through your um your malt, yeah, by extracting as much non-fermentable complex like pentose and hexose sugars that we taste as sweetness but yeast and bacteria don't touch so you can have a bunch of sugar, so then the beer starts tasting sweet to be able to handle all the hops they're trying to shove into these things and I thought okay just give me a lager right, so like probably six years ago, five years ago basically, you know my standard drink. Order if I go some places, like a lager and a shot of whiskey, you know what I mean, so normally I'm drinking, yeah.

So, I like we call that the citywide special. You've devolved, we have, we actually have um Oregon is a massive brewing state, some of you guys might know that we have a lot of great beer made here. There's a local brewery that I really, really love that's in our hometown in McMinnville uh it's called Heater Allen and they're Germanic-style focused beers, so pilsners lagers doppelbox things like that. And um you know I try to drink local as much as I can and support local and these beers are excellent and they represent like No residual sugar, style like they're dry, like they're tannic, dry, like, you can literally feel the tannins from the malt on, on the palate, on the palate, and coming from somebody who really does prefer wine more and like I like the tannic textures and I like that stuff, these beers really they contain that characteristic and um so it's a favorite local um so I don't think they send out of state um I don't know if they even go to southern Oregon at all I think it's just in the north but something to something to try to find out about um for any of you beer fans if you're visiting the Lemon Valley uh fantastic, it's called Heater. Allen and I don't know if you saw in the chat, but Nate's going to make Chad make beer this year.

Yes, we are; we are working on making beer, so um, yes, we have some other complex ideas we're we're not only working towards this idea of of having a farm that's diverse with wine grapes, but we're also having conversations real conversations that are actually in production and we're also having conversations that are working now, um, that are um hybrid farms of orchard barley hops grapes, basically fermentation farms. It's like the Rudolf Steiner-like uh you know family farm, like bucolic Austrian, you need to have like a Harrigan. too you need like uh like a like a humble little restaurant that serves the wine and like beanie sausages and stuff yeah yeah like an agriturismo yeah exactly yeah so you know we are currently keeping it all the fermentation based things we're not trying to say hey look at us we're a farm and we have cows and we have you know um it's it's a lot of extra work to manage livestock and things like that so we're trying to i mean we're looking at using uh livestock potentially just for like you know mowing grass um and things like that but and for fertilization but but it's a lot to manage and so with the scope of the projects that we're Currently working on that, which is really not something we can really do. So, everything we're focusing on really is like what? What can we plant that we can ferment and let's make a bunch of different fermented-type products because I think that I do, I mean I do know for sure I've got a lot of professional brewing friends that are basically saying that one of the major trends in brewing that's happening is going towards a state-made beer.

They're literally so as the prices for beer keep going up and people are like, 'Oh, yeah, I'll pay $20 for a six-pack when 10 years ago like it was hard for these guys to get more than eight.' Right as beer prices are going up, and people are like, 'Oh yeah, we're gonna have to pay and invest more and more money into these beers that you know require them to be more expensive because they're expensive to make; they're starting to actually look at this reality of possibly going from an industrial business model to a farming model, and we're going to start seeing a state-of-the-art vintage-based farms like beers and stuff um in America for sure. And it's I think it's pretty cool.

So we're thinking, okay well you know as excited as we are about wine, we also are obsessed with flavor, and we want to ferment other things, like whether it's Kimchi at making at home, or whether we're you know making cider and beer as well, and so we're kind of trying to think of this as like a fermentation farm that sort of covers a number of different things that will hopefully make it that much more exciting for people to, you know, to be involved in. Um I'm on board. Uh, so one more question hit us, oh this will be fun to talk about. We were speaking a little bit before about different palettes particularly in Asia with those like smoky soy sauces.

Um, has there been any um, has there been any influence or impact of like all the California fires um going your way, or have you know it's too big. Of an area, and then also, um, how has climate change impacted your winery specifically? You can't ask the climate change question, though it's like I know it was the same question; it wasn't the same question. I'm sorry, they are too, that's like that's like a, that's like it's a two-hour I know and I already asked like three of those. Yeah, let's talk politics. The world is getting warmer, and then also, we have for the climate change question we have an Australian in the mix which just like adds more gasoline onto the climate change question because, uh, sadly the Aussies are all cold, yeah, yeah; well, no, like.

for like all the different reasons yeah yeah um and i was going to say that we have in in oregon at linfield university we have one of the foremost climatologists in the world who you know is constantly showing our industry that the climate is warming so much that in less than 10 years you're not going to be a you know cabernet and zinfandel are going to be the main grape varieties that should be grown here you're out of the window of pinot noir yeah he loves he loves that he loves that show it's great i enjoy it as well but um so yeah climate climate change is definitely definitely real and happening you know it's that the same as your you know east coast is getting more erratic and and wetter we're getting uh less rainfall in the in the winter we're getting less cold winters we're getting drier summers um and we're just getting more erratic storms you know we get a little bit of a random ice storm you know that hasn't ever happened before so there's just yeah it's becoming more erratic and i think you're seeing that everywhere and we also had massive wildfires this year i mean we had we had the worst um air quality on the planet for like 10 days because the way that ow yeah with the way that ow and people had to pick grapes in that in the smoke guess Who guessed who was picking the grapes? It wasn't the vineyard owners, I'm pretty sure, yeah. Um, so wildfires are a huge issue. Um, and the way that our um you know airflow our weather patterns work here is that when the wildfires came, the smoke got pushed out to the coast, but then the Pacific Ocean pushes back in, so all of this smoke just settled in the Willamette Valley.

Um, and there'll be a lot of people not making Pinot Noir in 2020, there's going to be a lot of Rosé on the market, um, and a lot of sparkling wine more than likely. But we were super lucky because we had we only lost a third of our fruit, because we had so much diversity and Those grape varieties weren’t impacted the way that um Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris are impacted by smoke vehicles, so climate change is a very real um conversation for us and it needs to be continued to be had as as is the the varietal diversity conversation for those same reasons. You know, I don't think wildfires are going anywhere; it's like any biological system, though. You know, diversity makes you stronger, you know.

In biologically socially, you know uh it it it allows you to uh you know endure you know this unprecedented change that we are seeing in a way that you can’t if you are only dependent on a one-size -fits-all model um yeah you know for for all the reasons in the world and you know people talk a lot about monoculture in the context of viticulture when it comes to one species but it's vinifera but you know um i like the way you guys are bringing you know different varietals into that equation because you know there is like a lot of diversity within that one species just like you know you go to a dog park and they're all the same breed and you know you can make these really weird you know amazing mutts that you know i adore for the sake of my own mutt but you know by by the by the same token you know there's a lot of genetic diversity There and and and, you know, it makes like more interesting as opposed to you know uh you know less and and and, it makes you know hopefully, the wine industry more, more enduring um and more, you know, stronger uh for the sake of uh, you know, all the forces that, you know, are working against us because, you know, it's flimsy like you know yeah even post-pandemic like you know it's it's a you know we're at this inflection point on um a you know exponential growth curve, you know, for the sake of climatic forces and then um, you know, population growth and all these other things and, you know, it's very important for the wine world not to exist as An escape within all that you know, we are part of that all.

And you know, we need to drive change. You know, positive change within it. Yeah, we need to be having those conversations. And you know, look at California; they're buying land up here because we still get enough rainfall to have a crop. I mean, I don't know what California is going to do; they're facing so much, you know, challenges with the wildfires year after year. I mean, it's been three, three wildfire vintages out of the last five. Um, and then their access to water; I mean, is it even... It's not responsible to be making as an Aussie hot take should you be growing. Grapes, if you have to irrigate them exactly, yeah, exactly, it's are you allowed to answer that question as an Australian, yeah, that's a very large industry, but there are there are places within Australia where you can dry farm, oh totally, so the responsible thing to do is to find the land that's suited, otherwise like any other industry, you're just forcing the situation and it's usually going to result in a negative impact on the environment or people or something, I mean it's going to break you know the system, you can't force it forever, yeah, I mean the the old vines in the in the Barossa are not irrigated, you know they, look. At the old regions and old you need to assess the varieties that are yeah appropriate for these growing conditions as they as they change, yeah, the Okanagan has had huge bush has had huge wild fire wildfires for like two decades now, so than we are sadly.

Can you see? I'm looking at the chat. All right, we have to let Zoe get back to her Chinese food and you guys get back to the rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining us, this has been super fun. I feel like we have like additional footnotes to address for the sake of future lessons. But thank you so much for joining us today. We're privileged to have you, privileged to enjoy these wines and wish you all the best. Thank you all so much for Sunday. Yeah, thank you for the support. Thank you for having us; it's been lovely to meet all of you. This is the best pandemic Zoom I've ever been a part of – you say that about all the pandemic Zooms, though. Thanks everyone. Have a good day. Cheers.