Washington vs. Oregon - Distinguishing the Northwest's two unique wine regions by Robert Mayfield

The Columbia River Gorge is one of the world's most compelling natural wonders. Embracing the mighty Columbia River on either side, the gorge is a diverse wonderland of lush, dense forests, stark desert dunes, majestic cliffs and heart-stopping vistas. Over the course of 200 miles, the Columbia spans Oregon's major wine regions to those in Washington, dotted on either side by vineyards.

Driving east along the gorge and then north from Portland, Oregon, one can feel the air change from cool and humid to dry and thin. Either side of milepost 100, the hot desert air hits you like a smack in the face. It is here that Oregon and Washington snap together like two pieces of a puzzle. You've gone from Burgundy to Bordeaux in the blink of an eye.

Two adjacent states, both world-class wine producers, situated in the upper left hand corner of the United States so conveniently that from a distance it's tempting to simply lump them together under the Northwest heading, a habit that does each a great disservice.

"The differences between Washington and Oregon could not be more distinct," says Steve Burns, head of the Washington Wine Commission, "not only in wine styles, but in every other sense."

The climate in Washington's winegrowing region is hot. Oregon's is cool. Washington out-produces Oregon more than 5 to 1 and is the second largest wine-producing state in the union. Oregon is fourth.

Oregon's flagship variety is pinot noir. Washington's is merlot. The majority of Washington's wine region is semi-desert plateau, receiving 6 to 8 inches of rainfall each year. Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley averages 45 inches of rain per year.

Oregon has phylloxera, Washington doesn't. Washington has Stimson Lane, Oregon doesn't. (Stimson Lane is parent company to Washington's Chateau Ste. Michelle, Columbia Crest, Domaine Ste. Michelle, Northstar, Saddle Mountain, Snoqualmie Vineyards and Whidbey's.)

Washington is recognized for its powerful Cabernet Sauvignons, Merlots and Syrahs, wines of substance and authority. Oregon is best known for its elegant Pinot Noirs and Pinot Gris, wines of delicacy and structure.

Indeed, the landscapes from which they hail are mirrored in the wines each region produces. Master of Wine David Lake, who plied his trade in Oregon before becoming winemaker in 1979 at Washington's Columbia Winery, draws some distinctions: "There is a beauty and charm to Oregon that Washington lacks - it has a much more Burgundian feel to it. Washington has a more savage, grander landscape."

Terroir. Microclimate. Call it what you will, but the simple fact that almost all of Washington's vineyards are situated inland, east of the Cascade Mountains, residing in virtual desert, sets them apart in every way from the cool, coastal climate of the Willamette Valley.

In his first year as Columbia's winemaker, Lake produced a huge, dense, backward Cabernet Sauvignon blend that he labeled Millennium because he felt it had the stuffing to last through the turn of the century. He was right. I tasted it last year, and it has remained an intense and hefty wine.

In fact, Lake tried to have it both ways. He made Pinot Noir from Oregon's Bethel Heights Vineyard (one that he helped plant) from 1984 through 1986, but "they were always sort of Orphan Annies," he says with some disappointment. "People didn't understand why we'd want to be making an Oregon wine in Washington. It was always a bit awkward."

Pioneer Days

Even from the standpoint of history, the two states have little in common. Washington's wine industry was thriving prior to Prohibition. In the early 1900s, irrigation, made possible by captured snowmelt from the nearby Cascade Mountain range, allowed the Columbia Valley to blossom with a wide range of crops, including wine grapes.

Pre-Prohibition Oregon, however, was sparsely dotted with vineyards. Peter Britt, the photographer, started a vineyard and winery in southern Oregon called Valley View Vineyards. Among the few that flourished in the late 1800s were the Doerner Vineyard near Roseburg, and a vineyard and winery owned by Frank Reuter in the Willamette Valley.

Washington and Oregon both went dry in 1917, two years before Prohibition became national law. Washington survived, much as California did, by selling grapes to home winemakers and sacramental wines to the Catholic Church. In Oregon, only the Doerner Vineyard outlasted Prohibition.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Washington quickly reestablished itself as a wine-producing state, but Oregon lagged behind with only a minor spurt of commercial wineries, most of the fruit and berry sort.

By the 1960s, two large commercial ventures had emerged in Washington: Associated Vintners, which would become Columbia Winery, and American Wine Growers, which today is Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Resuscitating Oregon's modest wine prospects was a slower process, but thanks to a few determined souls, the die was cast by the late 1950s.

At the time, Richard Sommer, a UC-Davis graduate, was looking for a place to start a winery, somewhere north of California. "I studied the weather figures, also the climates and soils," he recalls, "and then scouted around. I made some wine from Oregon's Rogue Valley grapes. And then I found the Doerner Vineyard in the Umpqua Valley. It had about a half-acre, mostly zinfandel, and a bunch of old-fashioned varieties. I made wine out of those in 1957 or '58."

The exercise proved that even zinfandel would ripen this far north. "Hedging my bets, in 1959 I planted the first part of our vineyard [to riesling, zinfandel, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and pinot noir] just over the ridge from Doerner Vineyard." His Hillcrest Vineyard produced its first commercial wines in 1963. "When I tasted that first Riesling, I thought 'Wow!' " It was "much fruitier and more flavorful" than the California renditions with which he was familiar.

Sommer's enthusiasm drew others to Umpqua Valley, where a small cluster of wineries soon sprang up. It would take a couple of decades before quality caught up to enthusiasm.

Three years later and 160 miles north, Charles Coury, David Lett, and later Dick Erath and Dick Ponzi would follow parallel paths to Oregon's Northern Willamette Valley to plant cool-climate grapes, among them pinot noir and pinot gris.

Throughout the 1970s, Washington State's wine industry grew steadily with Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Winery as its anchors. Oregon, meanwhile, staggered along; that is until the famous back-to-back Paris and Beaune tastings of 1979 and 1980 in which an Eyrie wine bested some of Burgundy's finest. That triumph yielded instant validation, and soon a rush of individuals, most wanting to produce small amounts of world-class Pinot Noir, descended on the Willamette Valley.

Once established, both Washington and Oregon blossomed in the 1980s, and by the 1990s were enjoying a bona fide boom. Currently each state has leveled off at about 170 wineries.

Money Talks

On paper, it would be easy to reduce the difference between the two states to Big Business versus Mom and Pop.

Washington, after all, is home to the mighty Stimson Lane, Columbia Winery and Covey Run (both recently purchased by Canandaigua), and Hogue Cellars, all of which have significant national and international distribution. In Oregon, only three wineries produce more than 100,000 gallons of wine annually, with Willamette Valley Vineyards the leader at 205,000 (Washington's Columbia Crest alone produces about one million gallons per year).

And size makes a difference in more than image. Both states have lobbying agencies that are funded by tax dollars derived from wine growing. By sheer volume, Washington is far better funded to promote its wines.

But tax dollars alone could not have accomplished what the contributions of visionary Allen Shoup, the former president of Stimson Lane, achieved for the Washington wine industry. Tactically, he always put the Washington wine industry first, and Stimson Lane second. Under his stewardship, he paved the way for Seattle to host the bi-annual World Vinifera Conference, and helped establish the country's second largest charity wine auction, the Auction of Washington Wines (formerly the Auction of Northwest Wines). After nearly two decades as the architect of the modern Washington wine industry, Shoup retired last year.

Washington is not only about big winery conglomerates. Excluding the Stimson Lane, Canandaigua and Hogue properties, the remaining 165 wineries average about 7,000 cases per year. Among them, small, boutique wineries, such as Leonetti Cellar and Woodward Canyon, have done as much as any other to further Washington's image.

Oregon, by contrast, is a virtual beehive of tiny, artisan producers, many turning out as few as 500 cases per year. Even the "big" names, such as Eyrie, Adelsheim and Ponzi, produce less than 20,000 cases per year.

In fact, Oregon winemakers take pride in starting out and remaining small. "Mom and Pop" is not a derogatory term here, but an image eagerly cultivated and well deserved.

The dirty truth

Even if their respective climates, histories and economies were equal, Washington and Oregon would still be at polar ends of wine style for one reason: dirt.

Almost all Washington wine grapes are planted on desert plateau east of the Cascade Mountain Range, while most of Oregon's vineyards are west of the Cascades in rich, fertile valley soil.

From the vantage point of an airplane, the Columbia Valley is mostly undulating, sandy brown hills. Here and there are bright patches of green in very defined and distinct patterns, often circles, some carved into the contours of the hills. These verdant parcels mark the irrigated fields, many of which are vineyards. Fly over the Willamette Valley and a sea of plush greenery stretches to the horizon interrupted only by the blue ribbon of the Willamette River.

The Columbia Valley vineyards are mostly at elevations above 1,000 feet (those closer to the Columbia River dip down to 400 feet) with mostly sandy, arid soils. Here and there an ancient riverbed will form a denser, more shallow base. But by and large, sand is what you get. (Winegrowers theorize that phylloxera has never taken hold in Washington because of its sandy soils -- that and, perhaps, its harsh winters.) By contrast, the Willamette Valley is an ancient lake bed with much of its subsoil comprised of volcanic basalt. Most of the vineyards here are sited below 600 feet in elevation. The topsoil varies from shallow to deep, from clay to looser loam. The best sites need slopes for drainage.

Completing the terroir profiles are climatic factors. Washington and Oregon are affected collectively by the larger weather patterns coming down from the Arctic, or off the Pacific Ocean (witness El Niño and La Niña of a couple of years ago). For instance, 1993 and 1997 were cooler, wet years for both states, while 1992, 1994 and 1998 were hotter, drier years. But beyond that, each state is shaped by its own radically specific climate.

Although Washington is called a hot climate zone, it sometimes faces bitter-cold winters. Every five to seven years, the temperature will drop to 10 degrees below zero and stay there just long enough to do widespread damage to the vines. The last time it happened was January 1996 when 35 percent of the merlot crop was destroyed. Production was subsequently down by one-third industry wide. And so, the first criteria for any wine grape planted in the Columbia Valley is to be winter-hardy. (The key reason Washington produces very little zinfandel is the vine does not like chilly weather.)

And the cold may linger into spring and beyond bud-break, where concerns of frost damage continue into May. Large wind machines, which keep temperatures up by circulating the air, dot the vineyards in particularly susceptible areas. On cold nights, one can almost hear the gnashing of teeth as growers wearily watch the mercury dip below 40 degrees.

In Oregon, the challenge is rain, which can result in myriad problems, among them mildew. Growers here have learned to mitigate its threat; they have regular spraying regimes, and are ready to run out and hit the vines with sulfur after any downpour. Still, it's easy to get caught off guard and lose a part of the yield to mildew.

More than rain as a mildew-promoter, the bigger threat in Oregon is rain at harvest time. At Wilridge Winery in Seattle, Paul Beveridge makes big Columbia Valley Cabs and Merlots, but also turns out a small amount of Oregon Pinot Noir every year. "In Washington you simply wait around for the grapes to get ripe," he says, "but in Oregon, it's always nail-biting time. As you get closer to ripening, the rains come, then you ask yourself, 'Do I pick, do I wait?'" The challenge is in guessing right.

Otherwise good-to-great vintages have been decimated by early winter rains. In particular, 1984 has taken on a near mythic quality in Oregon as the most devastating, gut-wrenching harvest of all. After a relatively normal growing season, the rains set in about two weeks before harvest and never stopped. Some growers were picking at Thanksgiving, desperate for any kind of maturity in the grapes. More recently, however, they were blessed with three marvelous, back-to-back vintages - 1998, 1999 and 2000 - a highly unusual stroke of luck that Washington winegrowers also enjoyed.

Rejecting "The Northwest"

Both states have made an impact internationally for one reason: quality. Oregon's Pinot Noirs are compared favorably to Burgundy's, and Washington's Cabernets can stand shoulder to shoulder with those from California and even Bordeaux.

But Washington has it over Oregon when it comes to "fighting varietals" - $10-ish good quality, varietally correct wines. The state is rife with excellent Sémillon, Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc and Lemberger (the blaufrankisch grape of Austria) in that price range. In Oregon, it's slim pickin's when looking for a similarly priced bottle. The very demanding nature of pinot noir drastically inflates the cost of its production, and even chardonnay and pinot gris require more attention here, which harkens back to the cool climate factor. Oregon simply cannot ripen fruit at 6 tons to an acre. Washington, on the other hand, can and does quite effectively.

There are always exceptions to every rule, and in Southern Oregon much of the above is untrue. About one-eighth of Oregon's wine production currently comes from this region, an area that extends from Roseburg to the California border, where warmer climates dominate.

It is so much warmer than the Willamette Valley that Southern Oregon yields lovely Cabernet Sauvignon, Bordeaux blends, Syrah, Tempranillo and Dolcetto, a distinction that causes some infighting among the state's winegrowers. Many producers outside of the Willamette Valley resent the fact that most of the state's marketing efforts are centered on pinot noir, a variety that does not fare so well in Southern Oregon. (If and when a Southern Oregon appellation is granted, the situation may resolve itself.)

Both states have made substantial efforts to distinguish one region from the other, and to ensure wine quality - Oregon with its groundbreaking regulations of 1977, and Washington in 1999 by being the first state in the union to define the term "Reserve" on the label.

As American consumers become more savvy about this country's wine regions - learning the distinctions between our major appellations just as they did those of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhône - they will do well to put the term "Northwest wine" to rest.

The Columbia River Gorge is symbolic of the combined efforts of the two states, where hot complements cool; dry, wet; cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir; sémillon, pinot gris. As Steve Burns sums up pithily, "What's your fantasy? We'll fulfill it. You don't need to look any further than Washington and Oregon."

Just a little closer.

Robert Mayfield, who has been covering the Northwest wine scene for more than a decade, publishes The Wine Iconoclast, a monthly newsletter.