Between 1841 and 1869, hundreds of thousands of people travelled westward on the Oregon Trail as the USA expanded to its extreme North West Corner
Through over 2,000 miles and six states, the journey was arduous and sometimes dangerous,wagons pulled by oxen or could weigh as much as 2,500 pounds and a lot of the time the pioneers walked alongside the wagons.They had to cross the Rocky Mountains, they battle against cholera and weather in a journey that would take five months
Contrary to myths, the native population helped and rarely hindered the pioneers
The state of Oregon was born in 1859, it has a controversial history of racial intolerance but in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st Century is now regarded as one of the most tolerant places in the USA.
Now a new generation of pioneers are making their way to North West USA and they are heading for the wine
Quietly whisper it but the wine here,based around Pinot Noir,Chardonnay and Riesling is thriving ( and is extremely pallitable)
A community based not just around the vine yards of the Willamette Valley and the slopes of the Columbia Valley but also the urban wineries of Portland, a cornucopia of Entrepreneurial success with a mix of feminism thrown in
Across the vineyards of the valley and the urban wineries based around Portland, it is a case of everyone knows everyone else
Take Portland Wines, based in an unasumming building that once repaired fire extingiushers.
Open the door and you are are met with a modern wine tasting area overlookled by Barrels of Pinot Noir aging in French oak barrels.We do everything here,except grow the grapes says Matt Berson who started the operation in 2006 after he says “being rescued from the restaurant grind by a band of marauding Oregon winemakers.
“I worked in their cellars and vineyards until it got under my skin. Then I traveled to New Zealand, Napa, Germany, and Argentina, to work in their vineyards and wineries and discover the secret of making great wines”
A small producer, his operation makes around 4,000 cases a year.He started with Rieslings, the weather here is almost a carbon copy of that in the Riesling region in Germany) and moved into Pinot Noir.
When it is time to bottle the wine, a mobile bottling plant arrives at the premises
Matt is not alone.A mere 10 minutes away, is the Division Winemaking Company is a founded in 2010 by Kate Norris and Thomas Monroe.
Kate grew up in the Loire valley so knows a lot about wine.We were greeted outside her premises, which are currently in the process of being expanded by Pocket, her one year old shepherd dog and a glass of sparkling
There are no rules says Kate, like their are in France and that is what she finds so good
Their new premises are twice the size of the old, they are currently making 10,000 cases and Kate intend to double that and unlike Matt are starting to grown their own grapes after taking a ground lease.
Oregon, for Kate, is not just about the climate for grape growing but it is about the people and the food-“Economics is not about what you make but how you feel”
Anne Hubatch has been making wine for 24 years.She is a Mid West girl from Wisconsin and started while pregnant with her second child.From her initial 400 hundred cases, she is now closer to 5000 with over 20 different brands and brings the grapes up to Portland herself in a 26 tonne dumper truck.
Anne will say she was a novice, when she first came to Oregon, she didn’t know that this was one of the top wine regions.Her love for wine started when she worked in a tasting room and began by gleaning fruit from the tasting place
“ I think that I am gonna make with wine one day “ she vowed.
Oregon has a lower barrier to entrepreneurship and we are very community orientated, one of the reasons why Urban Wineries have taken off, she maintains.
If the region wants to compete with France and Europe when it comes to wine,then it is also trying to take on the old world when it comes to cheese
Olympia Provisions in the heart of the City of Portland hosted the American cheese makers guild last year
Founded by a brother and sister,son and daughter of Greek immigrants,The beauty of the rules of making cheese are there are no rules Kate tells us
Sampling the cheeses that afternoon,my initial doubts about American cheese were discarded, so much so that I was still nibbling on the various selections days later
But now back to wine.The sun was beating down and the slopes of Mount Hood were still covered in snow in the distance as we climbed through orchards of cherries,apples and pears to visit the vineyard of retired senior airline pilot Captain Bob Morus and his Phelps Vineyard
Only the most astute growers says Bob, came to the Gorge,following in the footsteps of those Oregon pioneers and he regards himself as one of those pioneers defiantly planting vines in an area renowned for growing apples and pears before adding expertise from Burgundy in the shape of Alexandrine Roy, fourth generation winemaker, along with Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris.
