Riesling Reflections: Oregon Riesling

– By Dan Berger

About 25 years ago I was walking through a trade tasting at which various Oregon wines were on display, and stopped at one table where a pourer was serving an Oregon Riesling. I took a sample and said to the server, “Smells a little like the Mosel.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” came a voice behind me, and the man who I turned to see was Peter Sichel, the man who made Blue Nun famous in the 1970s.

I handed my glass to Peter, an old friend even then, and Peter said, “Well, it IS like the Mosel!”

Thus was my introduction to Oregon Riesling, a category of wine that simply has flown under the radar for the last two decades, and which now has begun a slow resurgence.

Harry Peterson-Nedry of Chehalem Vineyards has seen Riesling over the last 30 years here and he is thrilled that Riesling is in comeback mode, even though nationally the wine is almost invisible.

“When I first started looking at the wine industry in 1980,” he said, “23% of everything that was growing in the state was Riesling. Since then, everything else has grown and only in the last few years has Riesling made a comeback.”

State statistics show that Oregon Riesling vineyard acreage has grown 32% in the last decade, but almost all of that growth has occurred in the last five years with the rapid growth in Riesling sales.

Still, only 800 acres of Riesling are growing in Oregon, most of it in the Willamette Valley area that is already wildly successful for Pinot Noir. Indeed, it is Oregon Pinot Noir that wholesalers and retailers want, and as a result both Riesling and Pinot Blanc, which the state makes so exceptionally, are lagging in sales nationally.

For a long while in the early years, Peterson-Nedry admitted, Riesling was a “cash-flow white that was fairly innocuous,” and much of it was sweet. He said most Oregon producers “weren’t serious about Riesling back then, and as a result Riesling languished for about 20 more years.”

The exception, he said, was “a small handful of very serious people who knew that this was arguably the best white wine in the universe. These were typically small producers who then grabbed Riesling and started treating it like Pinot Noir — growing the grapes better, getting smaller tonnages, and then seeing a wine with a transparency of the terroir.”

The best of Oregon Riesling is dry, and Peterson-Nedry said that at a tasting of 28 of the wines in early June, most of the wines were far better than they have ever been — “outside of the occasional flaws, which comes from having passionate but immature wine making. That’s the thing that needs to be watched.”

He said that scanner data do not come from places where is hand-selling. As a result, although grocery stores (most of which have scanners) show increases in Riesling sales, he said, Riesling sales growth is even greater at tasting rooms, restaurants, and at other places that sell direct to consumers where there is a knowledgeable sales person.

The dry style of wine is selling in part because much of it is in tasting rooms, where hand-sales are the norm. “The drier versions are popular anywhere there is hand-sell person.”

Peterson-Nedry estimates that about 10% of all Oregon Rieslings are bone dry (perhaps up to .5% residual sugar), and that medium dry wines account for perhaps 60% of the market, evenly split between medium dry and medium sweet.

In his estimation, Willamette Valley is the best region for Riesling, though some elevated places in the Umpqua Valley also make excellent Riesling.

Chehalem makes a small amount of a sparkling Riesling (called Sext!) that he says, “We can’t keep it in the tasting room more than a few months before selling out.”

He added that wines like this “are a lot more applicable to the things we are eating these days,” he said. It sells for all of $21.

One of the leaders in Oregon Pinot Noir is Argyle. Longtime wine maker Rollin Soles says he started with Riesling in 1988 from the old Cal Knudsen property, planted in the early 1970s.

“It’s my belief that Riesling, Chardonnay and a number of other white grapes don’t really show how great they are until they have produced a few crops,” said Soles, perhaps as many as eight harvests.

The key to most of the Argyle wines is that they were made dry, partly because Soles cut his teeth as a wine maker making dry, age-worthy Riesling for Brian Croser’s famed Petaluma Winery in Australia.

Working with Clare Valley fruit in Australia, Soles made wines that became superb with a decade or more in the bottle; as a result Argyle’s wines are striking with bottle age.

Part of the reason these wines hold so well is that Soles makes sure the pH levels of the wines is usually between 3.0 and 3.1. The wines show typical minerality, and usually have well under 1% residual sugar.

“I made one of America’s first dry-style Rieslings, and that got us into some very good restaurants,” he said.

The Knudsen vineyard from which his first wine came began to decline in the late 1990s, so 1999 was the last vintage off that original vineyard.

It was then that Argyle put in triple-density (“poor-man’s close-spacing”) Riesling vines on devigorating roostock, using a classic German clone.

“We took out vines that made $50-a-bottle Pinot Noir to do this,” he said, and now has six acres making a Riesling that sells for $18.

Soles sees a great following for the dry Riesling in London, “where the public seems to be about a decade ahead of American wine buyers.” Still, he acknowledges that dry Riesling sales are rising in the United States.

Another Oregon Riesling project worth looking at is at Brooks Vineyards in Amity. The family project makes some of the most stylish Riesling in America, some of which are not always showy when first released, but take dramatic nuances with a bit of time in the bottle.

Janie Brooks said the winery’s five acres of grapes, planted in the early 1970s, are augmented with some purchased fruit, and the winery now makes about 2,000 cases of mainly dry Riesling. Brooks also makes 300 cases of a medium sweet Riesling and about 150 cases of a Late harvest Riesling.

Brooks hired Chris Williams as head wine maker in 2006, and he has done a brilliant job of structuring the dry Rieslings. Early in their life, they show a superb though restrained fruit complexity, and then become sublime just a year or two after release.

“We have always done well with our dry Riesling,” she said, “and we are really hoping for a great result from Summer of Riesling,” the promotion in which literally more than 100 restaurants nationally will pour Riesling by the glass for all 94 days of summer.

“We have 10 restaurants in Portland area that are participating in Summer of Riesling,” she said. “From what I’ve found over the years trying to sell Riesling is that the key is to have it front of the right consumers – and this is great with a captive audience of foodies and wine lovers.”

Southern Oregon also makes some fascinating Rieslings, with Foris in the Rogue Valley among the most consistent producers. And Bridgeview’s Blue Moon Riesling, also of the Rogue, is one of the state’s most popular Rieslings, made in a slightly sweeter style.