Domaine Drouhin: When Burgundy Crossed the Ocean
Near Dundee, Oregon
There is no greater compliment to a wine region than for its rivals to move in, and that is exactly what happened here. The Drouhin family had made wine in Burgundy, France, since eighteen eighty, at their house Maison Joseph Drouhin in the town of Beaune. Robert Drouhin was the man who, after tasting Oregon Pinot Noir against his own great Burgundies in nineteen eighty, could not stop thinking about these hills.
In nineteen eighty-seven he bought land in the Dundee Hills, close to David Lett's Eyrie Vineyards, and founded Domaine Drouhin Oregon. It was the first time a Burgundy house had crossed the Atlantic to own and run an estate winery in Oregon. Robert chose this spot because in elevation, in the angle of the slopes, and in latitude, he found it remarkably similar to Burgundy itself.
He sent his daughter Véronique, trained in France, to make the wine, and her first Oregon Pinot Noir was the nineteen eighty-eight vintage. That a family with more than a century of French tradition would stake its name on this red Oregon dirt told the world that the Dundee Hills had truly arrived.
