Papa Pinot: David Lett and the Eyrie Vineyards
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
The tasting room here in McMinnville belongs to the Eyrie Vineyards, and to understand it you have to meet a man his fellow winemakers called Papa Pinot. David Lett graduated from the University of California at Davis with a degree in winemaking, and a stubborn idea. His professors insisted that the delicate Pinot Noir grape of Burgundy could never ripen properly in the United States outside of California.
Lett disagreed. In nineteen sixty five he drove north to Oregon's Willamette Valley and planted the first Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and related wine grapes the valley had ever seen. He and his wife Diana bought hillside land near Dundee and named it the Eyrie, after a nest of hawks above the vines.
They made their first Pinot Noir in nineteen seventy. Then came the moment that changed everything. At the Wine Olympics of nineteen seventy nine, a blind tasting of hundreds of wines from around the world, Lett's nineteen seventy five Eyrie reserve placed among the top ten Pinot Noirs in the world.
A stunned Burgundy producer, Robert Drouhin, staged a rematch the following year, and the Oregon wine finished second, behind one of Drouhin's own by only two tenths of a point. Oregon was suddenly on the world wine map, and Drouhin himself bought land here to prove it was no accident.
