An edited version of my earlier piece in
Gourmet and an indication of demands made on vineyard land that are re-surfacing in Oregon with a vengeance:
From this high, fallow
hill you can see much of Oregon’s famous Willamette Valley where pampered pinot
noir vines march off in neat formation toward scattered settlements and woods
and fields thst comprise a kind of visual agrarian homily. Oddly enough, this
bucolic setting, where swallows dip in the soft evening light, became the site
of land use struggles so familiar in Napa valley and other viti-cultural
venues. Controversy was limited to “how big the corn dogs
would be at the annual Turkey-rama,” according to Jason Lett, winemaker at
Eyrie Vineyards, and a leading opponent of a planned five-star hotel here.
In worn jeans, rimless
glasses and beard shadow, Jason didn’t much resemble his late father, David, who
left the Napa Valley back in the ‘sixties to prove that good pinot could be
grown in the Dundee Hills. He entered his 1975 South Block Reserve pinot noir
in the blind tasting held in Paris in ’79 that included the world’s best pinots,
including wines of Robert Drouhin. Eyrie won, inspiring disbelief and
consternation overseas and etching Oregon pinot onto the vinous world map.
Lett and two other
pioneers, David Adelsheim and Richard Ponzi, began to travel together around
America, proselytizing to the trade about their wines. Comity and mutual
assistance were taken for granted in those days, when all the Willamette
vintners could fit into Nick’s restaurant in McMinnville. Today Nick’s requires
reservations, in large part because of tourists attracted by agriculture. To
sacrifice vineyards is to harm both that business, and quality wine-making. As David
Lett said of the plan to build the hotel, “People turned out to be greedy, and
dumb.”
Many narrative lines
converge on this particular hill, most of them happily. Half-way down is the
Douglas fir where nesting redtail hawks gave rise to the name, Eyrie. Jason
Lett grew up almost in that tree’s shadow, eating Pacific staples his father
got by trading away Eyrie’s Pinot Blanc — “it went great with salmon and
Dungeness crab” — when money was tight. Jason took over as winemaker and today
successfully emulates his father’s style of wine and has another of his own.
Look to the left and you
will see the roof and extensive, closely-spaced vines of Domaine Drouhin, proof
that Robert Drouhin himself decided, after the fateful 1979 tasting, that if
this New World terroir was serious
stuff, why not buy some? Today Domaine Drouhin produces— ironically — the more
up-front, luscious style pinot noir, while Eyrie, devoid of new oak, is leaner
and more classically structured.
Farther
down the hill sits the Sokol Blosser Winery, founded by Bill and Susan Sokol
Blosser in 1977. They, along with David Lett, helped convince Yamhill County to
terminate what was then five-acre residential zoning, so vines could be planted
instead of houses. “The American ethic of ‘I can do whatever I want with my
property’ has got to change,” said son Alex, referring to the prospect of a
hotel rising from green waves of vitis
Vinifera. And he echoed the sentiment heard often here: “We don’t want the
Napa-fication of the Willamette.”
The Willamette isn’t Napa. It’s too
large, for one thing, and too diverse. Two hundred and fifty commercial crops
are grown, whereas Napa’s trellised monoculture occupies every square foot of
tillable land. By contrast, the views from wineries spread around the northern
Willamette — from Elk Cove to Bethel Heights, from Amity to Cristom — are of fields
of grain, cattle, wood lots, and rolling country with some vineyards and
mercifully few McMansions.
The Dundee hills come
closest to the Napa Valley analogy: many wineries, concentrated wealth, a
couple of aspiring châteaux, and traffic jams on Highway 99 down on the valley
floor. This resembles Napa’s Highway 29, but here more of the cars are bound
for the Spirit Mountain casino than for tasting rooms. The highway passes
through the towns of Newberg, Dundee, Lafayette, and McMinnville, which has a
well preserved historic downtown that attracts tourists and an occasional limo.
B&Bs have sprung up in the Dundee Hills, too.
Enter now David Kahn, in pristine white sneakers, stepping
from the red Lexus he used as an extension of his Portland real estate office. He and his investors had development rights on
the hilltop. Kahn wanted nothing more, he told me, than to bring world-class
R&R into the coveted heart of Oregon
pinot-dom, and to help everybody in the process. “It can be done here,” he said,
meaning that a five-star hotel and spa would prosper in the midst of so much
rural eye candy. He lovingly referred to his proposed hotel as “the Auberge de
Soleil of the Willamette,” referring to that $600 minimum-a-night “inn” that
clings to a mountainside above Napa Valley, where tourism has come to rival — and challenge — agriculture.
Kahn lauded the number of private jets that he had seen in
the air over Napa, and other high-end manifestations in that crowded Eden,
including the specialty cuisine-cum-condiment boutique, the Oakville Grocery,
which he called “the greatest place on earth.” Such enterprises greatly
stimulate the local economy, he pointed out, and would here, too. But both it
and Auberge de Soleil were grandfathered in; they could not be built there today.
This hill in Dundee, however, could support vines, despite its
altitude, as proven by those growing all around it. Oregon has long prided itself on the
preservation of its agriculture. Long-standing land use laws prohibit
commercial projects in the midst of farmland because they interfere with
farming and permanently remove the land from the possibility of ever being
farmed. Additional issues with Kahn’s proposed
hotel included a falling water table, increased traffic, sewage, various sorts
of waste—including, possibly, brine brought up from deep marine sediments where
well-diggers would likely have to go—and permanently altered views from below.
Two dozen vintners joined
hands and signed a letter opposing Kahn’s project, but Yamhill County’s
three-person governing board of commissioners granted him an exception anyway.
The sole Democrat on the board, Mary Stern, a lawyer, said she had no choice
but to vote for the exception because Kahn and his lawyers proved to her
satisfaction that a five-star hotel could succeed nowhere else in the county.
“If I could have voted against it,” she said, “I would have.”
But the vintners’ lawyer
said that the county had no idea where such high-impact facilities should go,
or how they should function. “It shouldn’t be done on an ad hoc basis. We need
a comprehensive plan.”
“Kahn’s bill passed,” said
Lett, “simply because a lot of people with a lot of money want to stay in wine
country.” Among the hotel’s other opponents was Domaine Drouhin’s manager,
David Millman. “The hotel’s a great idea,” Millman admitted over a glass of chardonnay
on Domaine Drouhin’s deck, “but in the wrong place. Kahn couldn’t do this in Burgundy, or in Napa.”
The county commissioners’
ruling went to the Land Use Board of Appeals and ended up in Oregon’s court of appeals. After
deliberating for many white-knuckled weeks, the court asked for an extension, an
indication of the importance of the case and the novel questions it raised. The
court sent the application for the hotel back to the Land Use Board of Appeals
for further consideration. Both protection of farmland and growing urbanization
had to be better addressed in granting such exceptions, the court said.
Vintners in the Willamette fretted then over the
generally roiled state of land-use law in Oregon, where the notorious Measure 37
referendum, which passed in 2004, allowed some residential development in ag
zones after a hiatus of 40 years. A new referendum, Measure 49, designed to
counter Measure 37, narrowly passed but only patched up the damage done by the
earlier one.
Although the prospects of any luxury spa capping the Dundee hills
dimmed and finally were extinguished, it was clear that pro-development
sentiment in rural Oregon
wasn’t going away.
Well, it has been a full year since I started this blog and readership has grown from a handful of hits to thousands. I have expanded the coverage to include things only tangentially related to wine and plan to continue. I will include in the new year my own experience of having a novel published that's ostensibly about the fine wine business but is really the story of making it in America - and holding onto your own cherished piece of it. And I will bring back Nose himself, the indefatigable sleuth in the imaginary valley of northern California's Caterina River, the original inspiration for this blog.
