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Twenty Years On

Milestones: Measuring Progress or Marking Time?

By Harry Peterson-Nedry

Wynne and Ian Peterson-Nedry during Harvest 1987, grapes destined for Adelsheim, not Smucker's.

It should have been scary, but it wasn’t. With a four-year marriage, children just three and newly born, and a good-paying technical job demanding time day and night, we decided that to seek utter fulfillment buying a vineyard in 1980 was not too much. Our plans were to farm, make wine experimentally and then commercially, and maybe move from Portland to wine country. Equipped with spreadsheets and visions of great Pinot Noirs extrapolated decades into the future, our detailed dreams were as plentiful as funds to accomplish them were hard to find. Dreams and a bold confidence seem to define youth, no matter what age. And I was 32.

Ridgecrest Vineyards was born on a site too far west toward the Coast Range to be successful, according to conventional wisdom at the time. My naïveté served as wisdom then, knowing rudimentarily what site was right for grapes but, admittedly, lucking out in taking part of Norm and Betty Chapman’s property on the top of Ribbon Ridge—the first and last property I looked at while purchasing the dream.

Growing up on a farm, I knew about tractors, implements, seasons, and Mother Nature’s capricious side. And, grapes I thought I could learn, especially with help from early consultants Mark Benoit and Joel Myers. Some parameters have changed slightly over the years—we’ve continued to raise the standard, but began by and large correctly—ordering plants in 1981 and planting in spring 1982. This was our beginning, and we were consumed by the same unrestrained Monty Python-esque view of our generation's fun, topsy-turvy world that has fueled magical growth over the last quarter century.

Milestones

This fall we are celebrating the release of the 2004 Ridgecrest Vineyards Pinot Noir, which represents the 20th Harvest at Ridgecrest Vineyards. Chehalem released a single-vineyard Ridgecrest Pinot Noir as its first wine in 1990, so 2004 is also the 15th Chehalem Ridgecrest bottling, and, with original operations beginning at this vineyard site in 1980, the 25th anniversary of beginning the dream.

Why?

To plant vineyards, make wine, realize you also have to sell it, and, like all small business owners, occasionally be ultimately creative at minor elements like making payroll is not everyone’s idea of fun. There were no guarantees of success, and sometimes my decisions seemed foolish to others—although never foolish to me. At times, it was embarrassing: Asking friends if they wanted to experience the thrill of owning part of a vineyard with a very slight return on their investment sowe could trellis the next vineyard block. Or, explaining that you didn’t know why crop yield was half of what it should have been, and describing how you would survive if it happened two years in a row.

Ridgecrest Vineyards (summer 1983).

The early years: Ridgecrest in the summer of 1983 (5-acre & 7-acre blocks).

But creating is the ultimate high. The idea of elevating a primitive agricultural product to an art form with aspects of timelessness self-actualizes even a chemist looking for meaning. To begin a tradition where there was none, to emulate what I admired elsewhere as the perfect life set around a heritage farm crop, to be independent and yet a member of a pioneering family of winemakers with similar values were huge draws to me. Some of this I didn’t realize until consumed by it. The quest for the Holy Grail of Pinot Noir began the adventure, but the community and pull of creating kept me going.

I have been captivated by wine for almost forty years, as stimulation and aspiration, perhaps as a metaphor for life’s richness. Wine, and other art, at their best provide a blend of complexity, human interpretation, and intellectual stimulation. As media, they give you the ability to speak about another time with passion, beauty, and, in a real sense, a measure of immortality. It may sound overblown and self-important, but wine speaks to me of a life well-lived. Of meaning.

Success & Validation

The Oregon wine industry has grown exponentially over the 26 years I’ve been around, with 1,200 acres of grapes turning into 14,000 acres, and its reputation becoming international as the birthplace of New World Pinot Noir. We see large players establishing wineries and vineyard operations or buying existing pioneer brands, and we see land prices ten times what they were 10 to 15 years ago.

First harvest at Ridgecrest Vineyards (1985). For example, the price of acreage for grapes on Ribbon Ridge, where we pioneered grapegrowing with Ridgecrest, and which has doubled in the last five years, now demands per-acre prices of $20,000 plus—I bought in 1980 at a high price of $3,000; I bought additional adjacent acreage in 1990 at $1,400; I bought and sold parcels in 1995 at $5,000 per acre; I set a price record at the time for the county in 2000 when I purchased the Chapman homestead for $15,500 per acre, in competition with a California winery owner, flush with cash from the sale of his winery.

Ridgecrest Numbers. Despite obvious respect and interest from outside the state, and acknowledgment that the industry is now finally deemed investment-worthy by banks and attractive to baby boomers with cash and golden lifestyle dreams aplenty, true validation comes from a different place—from the next generation. The industry that began 40 years ago is in general not selling for a sunny retirement but passing the baton to the next generation, in what is a critical relay for most of us. For, if we’re honest, our success rests not with how fast we can run our leg, but in how faithfully we pass on the magic and beauty of competing, the thrill of the race, and the dynamic of teamwork. The greatest pride for pioneers is seeing a second generation that despite having grown up with the abuse of being grapegrowers’ and winemakers’ children—being babysat by grapevines, knowing every winery parking lot in four countries, commuting hours each day to go to good schools, and celebrating peculiar holidays like budbreak or veraison—also sees the magic of creativity, of hard work, and of annual renewal.

We all take great pride when Steve Vuylsteke, Jason Lett, Adam and Anna Campbell, Morgan Broadley, Luisa and Maria Ponzi, Alex and Alison Sokol Blosser, Ben and Jon Casteel, and Jesse Lange return from the real world to make their own magic. And some are still working it out, like Tawny Paul and the Etzel and Wright boys. After time spent soul-searching, my daughter, Wynne, has also decided to make ours a second-generation winemaking family, traveling south this fall to become one of twelve new graduate students entering UC Davis’ enology program.

Then, Now & the Future

The challenges presented by global climate change, political uncertainties from
land-use or right-to-farm erosions, rapid industry growth, and a normally capricious marketplace are enough to keep us creative today and in the future.

We will see benefits from our new AVAs, allowing us to keep small, collaborative efforts and good communications alive, despite the size of a growing industry.
New varieties and bizarre vineyard locations will amaze us, as we try to keep cool-climate varieties cool or else adapt warmer varietals to our new climate.Rather than an urge to create from scratch, adaptation will become the engine for change. But, trusting instincts and thinking outside the “wine” box will still be key.

Stoller Vineyards at night (opened in 2005). We will continue to be environmentally sensitive leaders
in farming, construction, marketing, and tourism. Value-added
agriculture and linkages between wineries and the food chain of restaurants, farmers’ markets, and tourism will paint a new world that “thinks globally, but eats locally”
and that shifts consumption lifestyles to healthy.

Change will be great enough to where the industry players today will still be thought of as pioneers.

ABOVE: Stoller Vineyards, an energy efficient gold/LEED certified winery, was opened by partners Bill & Cathy Stoller in 2005 (photo © Mike Haverkate).

(Note: A good book about Oregon wine families, At Home in the Vineyard, by Susan Sokol Blosser was published earlier this year by University of California Press and is a good read.)

Timeline Part 1

Timeline Part 2

Timeline Part 3