Tradition: In the Winery

Our winery melds innovation with centuries-old winemaking tradition to craft elegant Pinot noirs that combine pure, compelling flavors and complex textures. Our goal is to make wines that clearly "tell the story" of each unique vineyard and vintage.

Pinot Noir

Eric Lemelson and Winemaker Anthony King believe that using native yeasts that flourish in healthy vineyards, rather than single yeast strains mass-produced by commercial labs, allows for the purest expressions of terroir and also make more complex wines. As of vintage 2003, every lot of Pinot noir we've made has fermented solely with native yeasts.

Jim attends to the wine

Each vintage is aged for a minimum of 14 months in French oak barrels until shortly before bottling. Winemaker King normally employs little or no racking prior to the assemblage of the blends in tank, leaving the wines to evolve naturally in barrel. We take great pains to avoid manipulating our wines to achieve homogenous results. Sometimes that requires patience – waiting for wines to evolve and choosing not to actively intervene.

Other times it involves simple solutions, like oxygenating a wine by racking with air. We choose not to filter our Pinot noir, and fine with a light hand and only when necessary. Our goal is to make great Pinot noir, and we always keep that foremost in our minds.

White Wine

In contrast, Chardonnay, Pinot gris, and Riesling may begin their fermentation in stainless steel, but except in the case of Riesling, soon move down to the cellar under gravity to complete their long, cool fermentation and aging in French oak. King employs weekly batonnage, or lees stirring, of the Chardonnay and Pinot gris to regularly enrich the wine with the sediment on the bottom of the barrel. This labor-intensive technique, first used in Burgundy, produces rich white wines with creamy textures and soft fruitiness.

Ultimately, true quality in a great wine comes from careful, attentive viticulture. For more information, see our vineyard section.

Tradition: In the Vineyards

We manage our six vineyards with great care and respect for the land, avoiding tractor travel when soils are wet, making sure to avoid erosion by seeding cover crops in the fall prior to significant rains, and using organically-approved sprays only when necessary. We try to emulate and learn from the farmers whose efforts preceded ours in this unique corner of Western Oregon. As a token of our respect, we've named each of the six estate vineyards to honor the families that owned and worked the land before Eric purchased it.

Careful tending of the Vineyards makes all the difference