Good Grape Wine Company

June 1 2007

Oregon’s Columbia Gorge and The Pines 1852 Vineyard & Winery

Doug Pendleton, known in this area as the eponymous ‘Wine Guy,’ Owner of the Grapevine Cottage, perhaps the best wine shop in Indiana, wrote this dispatch on a recent Spring trip to Oregon wine country.  Doug should really get a blog, as he writes excellent, long-form weekly emails for legions of Central Indiana wine lovers, the source of the below article.  Readers of this blog know that I like to occasionally highlight wines and wineries with Indiana roots (Kokomo, Sapid, Cherry Hill, et al) and this winery is no different.  Lonnie Wright, vineyard and winery owner for The Pines 1852, is a native of Plymouth, IN—known mostly for producing Scott Skiles, current basketball coach for the Chicago Bulls.

Thanks to Doug for the permission to reprint his recap of a great day spent in the Columbia Gorge area of Oregon.  If you’re in Central Indiana, Grapevine Cottage is now the third state carrying The Pines 1852 wine including their OVZ (Notes Below), a Pinot Gris, Viognier, a white blend and a red blend.

The Pines 1852 Old Vine Zinfandel 2005 Columbia Gorge, Washington $29
A Wine Guy Selection
The Pines wines result from a collaboration between grower and owner Lonnie Wright and winemaker Peter Rosback of Sineann. Big and soft, with gobs of brambly blackberry and ripe plum fruit, touched by notes of black pepper,  this is an elegant, food-friendly Zinfandel that surprisingly displays none of the heat you would expect from its 15.8% alcohol. 

The Columbia Gorge

When we first began to plan this trip back in December, one of our goals was to spend some time with Peter Rosback, winemaker and owner of Sineann Winery.  So, when Peter told me he would probably be in New Zealand making wine there during the March Pinot Noir harvest, I began to reconsider the trip.  Then that six degrees of separation thing intervened (actually it was three degrees). Over Christmas, an old friend and good customer, Mike Burks, brought me a bottle of wine from The Pines 1852 Winery in Oregon. It seems he had hooked back up with his old college friend, Lonnie Wright, who was now a grape grower and winery owner in Oregon and Lonnie had sent him a case of his wine. 
First degree, “Here, Doug, see what you think of this bottle of Syrah.”  Well, we tried it and not only was it very, very good… the style sure was familiar.  The first thing I learned when I spoke to Lonnie on the phone was that not only did he grow a lot of the grapes Peter Rosback uses, including the Old Vine Zinfandel that put Peter on the map, Peter makes all of the wines for Lonnie’s Pines Winery!

Second degree, I knew that Mike had gone to Butler, but I never knew that he and Lonnie had graduated just one year ahead of me.
Third degree,  we discovered that Lonnie had grown up in Plymouth, Indiana, just a few short miles north of Linda’s childhood home.

Suddenly, we had good reason to go to Oregon.  If you are amongst our customers, you almost have to know that we all think that Peter Rosback makes some of Oregon’s best wines.  The tasting we held with him are the most successful we have ever had and his Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay have sold out every season.  Peter may be one of Oregon’s leading winemakers, but Lonnie is one of its leading growers and the pioneer of the entire Columbia Gorge area.
The Columbia Gorge is one of the country’s newest wine growing appellations and Lonnie is one of its patron saints.  It begins about 60 miles east of Portland near Hood River and stretches for 40 miles along the steep slopes of the Columbia River and its tributaries.  Having a   universe of tiny micro climates, the region has none of the Burgundian limitations of the Willamette Valley to the west.  Cabernet, Merlot and Zinfandel thrive here, along with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The key seems to be knowing what to plant where and Lonnie seems to be one of the masters.
Our first stop was the vineyard that started it all for Lonnie ... the three acres of old vine Zinfandel vines that he brought back from 20 years of neglect in the early 1980’s.  Somewhere between 1906 and 1914, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Comini came by way of California to cut stone for the Cascade Locks on the Columbia river.  And he brought Zinfandel vines with him to his new home.  He planted them on a terraced 30 degree slope just south of the town of Dalles on the Columbia River. Just below the vineyard is Lonnie’s home and the future home of his winery, The Pines 1852, named for The Pines Dairy that operated on the property from 1926 through the 1940’s and the 1852 land grant that established the property. 

What struck me at first was the fact that while very gnarled, the vines were only a few inches in diameter.  In California, the 100 year vines we encountered looked like ancient tree trunks.  The answer is in the climate.  Columbia Gorge does not enjoy the maritime influence that moderates the winter temperatures in the Willamette Valley.  It can get cold enough to freeze the vines to the ground.  And when it does, like it did in 1986 and 1991, the trunks must be cut away and new shoots nursed up from the roots.  It’s a painful experience since the entire vineyard loses a full year’s production. 
Nearby, we saw the new Pines Zinfandel vineyard that Lonnie has planted with cuttings from the old vine Zin along with his Merlot and Cabernet Vineyards.  He also manages hundreds of acres of other vineyards all over the area including the McDuff, Wyeast, Celio and Phelps Creek vineyards that fans of Sineann Pinots and Cabernets might recognize.  You have to admire passion, and Lonnie has plenty for his grapes.  He learned his trade in the 70’s working for Columbia Crest, helping to plant the thousands of acres of vineyards in the Columbia Valley that now produces some of the best wine values in America.  We spent the entire day visiting vineyards, watching his crews prune and generally learning more than our brains could absorb about the unique and diverse viticulture of the Columbia Gorge.
About four in the afternoon, after more vineyards and beautiful scenery than anyone can absorb in one day (the scenery in this part of Oregon makes Napa look like Terre Haute), we found ourselves at the new The Pines 1852 tasting room in downtown Hood River Oregon.  There, we tasted through the entire portfolio - the Pinot Gris, the Viognier, the Syrah, the Merlot, the Old Vine Zinfandel, his new Satin, a blend of Pinot Gris and Gewurztraminer and the Big Red, a blend of all four of his red varietals.  Lonnie and Peter seem to have an interesting symbiotic relationship ... when we tried the Zinfandel Port, I noticed that Lonnie calls the Port Sweet Sierra while Peter calls it Sweet Sidney ... same wine, different daughters!

As you can imagine, Lonnie’s production is quite small and currently the wines are only distributed in Oregon and Washington.  The good news is the Indiana will be the third state!  We hope to have some of his two blended wines for the wine club soon and should even have a little left over to sell.  And, if we ask real nice, I hope to get some of the Zin, Syrah and Merlot as they are released.   

digg this | toast this! | add to del.icio.us | add to newsvine | add to furl | add to reddit |

Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print |