The Dundee Hills: Where American Pinot Noir Was Born

Look at the ground here, and you may notice it is red. Not brown, not gray, but a deep rusty red, almost the color of dried brick. That color is iron, and it is the reason wine lovers around the world know the name Dundee.

These are the Dundee Hills, a gentle dome of volcanic earth rising above the Willamette Valley about thirty miles southwest of Portland. The red soil is called Jory, and it formed from lava flows of the Columbia River Basalt more than fourteen million years ago. It is deep, well drained, moderately fertile, and rich in iron, and in twenty eleven Oregon named it the official state soil.

But in the middle of the twentieth century, nobody thought these hills could grow fine wine at all. When a young Californian named David Lett arrived in the nineteen sixties with a plan to plant Pinot Noir here, his own professors at the University of California at Davis advised against it. The summers were too cool, they said, the autumn rains too heavy.

The grapes would never ripen. Lett did not listen. In nineteen sixty-five he brought grape cuttings north, and in nineteen sixty-six he and his wife Diana planted Pinot Noir on a former orchard in these very hills, at a vineyard they called Eyrie.

Others followed, Charles Coury, Dick Erath, the Ponzis, the Sokol Blossers, a small band of dreamers turning abandoned prune and hazelnut orchards into vineyards. They were chasing a hunch, that Pinot Noir, the heartbreak grape of Burgundy in France, would find a second home in this cool northern light. They were right.

Within a generation the wines of the Dundee Hills were being compared to the great red Burgundies of France, and a Burgundy family itself, the Drouhins, would cross an ocean to plant here. Today dozens of vineyards cover these slopes, and the tasting rooms draw visitors from everywhere. But it all began with red dirt, a stubborn theory, and a handful of people who refused to believe the experts.

You are standing in the birthplace of Oregon wine.