Region & History

Richard Sommer arrived in the Umpqua River valley in 1961 with a truckload of vine cuttings. There he planted Oregon's first postwar European wine grapes, in a place no one had previously considered, and everyone advised against it, because the textbooks of the time insisted that Vitis vinifera, the European wine grape, absolutely required heat. In southwestern Oregon it rained almost daily. Sommer founded Hillcrest Vineyard in the Umpqua Valley anyway. Unknowingly, he became the first of two beginnings.

The second beginning came four years later. David Lett had studied winemaking in California, and his professors told him the same thing they'd told Sommer: too cool, too wet, hopeless for a grape that balks at too much rain even in Burgundy. He bought land in the red hills near Dundee anyway. Until then, the area had mostly held walnut trees and sheep pasture. In 1965 he planted the first vines of his winery, Eyrie Vineyards, and had to wait five years before the young vines even produced enough grapes for a first vintage.

In 1979, Lett sent his 1975 South Block Reserve to Paris. There, 62 judges blind-tasted 330 wines from 33 countries against each other, and a humble Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley landed among the top ten overall, ahead of quite a few famous names from Burgundy. The Burgundy négociant Robert Drouhin didn't believe the French. The following year he organized a second tasting of his own. Lett's wine narrowly missed first place there, edged out only by Drouhin's own 1959 Chambolle-Musigny. The message had gotten through regardless. The Drouhin family soon bought land of their own in the Dundee Hills.

In 1983 the TTB officially recognized the Willamette Valley as its own wine region. The US agency, short for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, granted what's known as an AVA, short for American Viticultural Area, a designation of origin that, unlike in Europe, only draws a boundary and prescribes neither grape varieties nor yields. Umpqua Valley followed in 1984. Rogue Valley joined in 1991. Today the state counts more than twenty such regions, from the cool hills around Portland to the hot, dry valleys near the California border.