I came to the Willamette Valley knowing nothing about Oregon wine, which turned out to be the correct approach. If you arrive knowing nothing, people in these small tasting rooms will explain everything, and the explanation will involve multiple pours of multiple vintages from the same hillside, and by the end of the afternoon you will understand why the wine is good in a way that no book had managed to convey. The valley sits between the Coast Range and the Cascades, which together deflect the worst of both the Pacific storms and the continental cold, creating something close to a Burgundian microclimate at 45 degrees north — the same latitude as Bordeaux, though the volcanic Jory soils and the Willamette River fog are emphatically not Bordeaux.
The pinot noir is the story everyone tells, and it is true. But what struck me more on my first visit was the variety of expression within a single grape in a single valley. The wines from the Dundee Hills red volcanic clay are different from the wines grown on the Chehalem Mountain sedimentary soils, and both differ from the marine sediment vineyards near the valley’s western slopes. I tasted this systematically, meaning: I drove from winery to winery on a gray October Tuesday, and at the sixth stop I began to understand what systematic tasting actually means. It means you’re very happy by early afternoon.
The town of McMinnville is the valley’s useful centre — practical in the way that real wine towns are practical, with an excellent food supply, multiple places to sleep off a tasting day, and the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, which has no connection to wine but does house the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s flying boat, hanging in a full-size aviation hall with the kind of ambient lunacy that I find restoring after an afternoon of serious viticulture. I had dinner at a farm-to-table place on Third Street where the menu changed weekly according to what the kitchen had sourced from the valley floor farms. The mushrooms were chanterelles from the Coast Range foothills. The lamb was from the Willamette Valley floor. The pinot was from four miles away. This proximity is the whole point.
The valley grows more than wine. The hazelnut orchards run in long rows between the vineyards — Oregon produces ninety-nine percent of the American hazelnut crop — and in late summer the hop yards are in full growth, their bines climbing twenty feet of trellis in preparation for harvest. The berry farms south of Salem produce marionberries, a variety developed by the USDA in the 1940s that I had never encountered before my first summer here and now consider one of the genuine achievements of Oregon agriculture: deep purple, tart-sweet, with a complexity that makes other berries feel like rough drafts.
The Amity and Eola-Amity Hills sub-appellation in the southern valley is the place I keep returning to — less visited than the Dundee Hills, with a leaner style of pinot driven by a significant gap in the Coast Range called the Van Duzer Corridor that lets cool Pacific air push into the vineyard zone each afternoon. The wines from here have an energy that the richer Dundee styles sometimes lack. At a small producer in Amity I tasted a single-vineyard pinot that had been sitting in a used barrel for eighteen months and was ready to be bottled. Even before bottling, in a cold barrel room, it tasted like exactly where it came from.
When to go: Harvest season — mid-September through October — is the valley at its most active, with crush happening in the wineries and the vines turning gold. The Yamhill County Thanksgiving open house weekend in late November is when the smaller producers open their doors. July and August are dry and warm with full farm stands along Highway 18.