Basic HTML Version
September 26 - 28, 2012
| Portland Tribune & Community Newspapers |
www.oregondaysofculture.org
>
OREGON DAYS OF CULTURE
7
By Christian Gaston
Pamplin Media Group
In the spring of 2011, Jeff Peterson and
Thomas Hellie met Oregon wine pioneer
Dick Erath at Dundee Bistro to talk wine.
Peterson, head of Linfield College’s newly
established Center for the Northwest,
brought Hellie, the college’s president, to
pitch Erath on a new project: The Oregon
Wine History Archive.
Peterson hoped to gath-
er personal papers and
recollections from people
such as Erath, who built
the Willamette Valley’s
wine industry from whole
cloth and created a new
brand, Oregon Pinot Noir,
that would bring the re-
gion international fame.
The hope was to build an
archive that would memo-
rialize the industry’s birth
and detail the lives of
those early growers.
It wasn’t a hard sell.
“Well they say all politics is local,” Erath
told Peterson and Hellie. “And I think history
should be local. I can’t think of a better place
than Linfield to have these papers.”
Since then, Linfield’s archives have grown
to include a 1974 bottle of Erath’s pinot noir,
one of the state’s earliest, roughly 80 linear
feet of papers, maps and photographs detail-
ing the work of Erath, David and Diana Lett,
Myron Redford, David Adelsheim, Bill Bloss-
er and Susan Sokol-Blosser and Dick and
Nancy Ponzi.
The archive is a perfect fit for Linfield, lo-
cated in McMinnville, just a short drive from
Oregon’s pioneering pinot noir wineries.
Peterson said that core of early Oregon pi-
not growers has contributed heavily to the
archive, which he hopes will continue to tell
their stories long after the first wave of pinot
pioneers pass on.
“Dick has been very kind as has been Su-
san Sokol-Blosser and the Ponzis, they actu-
ally spend time with our students,” Peterson
said.
The archive is maintained in a 65-degree
atmosphere (about 10 degreeswarmer than a
wine cellar) and tended by full-time archivist
Rachel Woody and a rotating cast of student
archivists who gather material from donors
then sort and digitize it. Not all the material
can be digitized, but what does make it to the
computer winds up online at Linfield’s digital
commons, opening the virtual doors of the
archive to the world.
“It brings alive unique items that are nor-
mally not available to the public unless they
come to the archives,” said Linfield Library
Director Susan Barnes Whyte. “People can
do a Google search on Oregon wines and
come across these archives.”
The story of Oregon pinot noir begins in an
unlikely place, the Univer-
sity of California, Davis. It
was there that a handful of
renegade winemakers de-
veloped the idea of grow-
ing pinot noir and other
grape varieties in places
like Oregon.
Far to the north of sunny
California, the climate and
soils of theWillamette Val-
ley should mimic the con-
ditions of central Europe.
Or so the theory went.
In 1965, David Lett
brought thousands of wine
cuttings to Oregon and planted his first
grapes in the hills of Dundee. The same year,
Charles Coury, another UC Davis student
planted a variety of grapes— including pinot
noir — on David Hill, near Forest Grove. Er-
ath, another UC Davis grad, made his first
barrel of wine in his garage that year.
Coury’s wines never made a big splash.
But by 1975, Lett’s pinot noirwaswowing crit-
ics and battling with French wines grown
from comparatively ancient stock.
Lett’s Eyrie Vineyards was joined by Er-
ath’s vineyard in 1968, Myron Redford’s Am-
ity Vineyards in 1970, Sokol-Blosser wines in
1970, Ponzi Vineyards in 1970 and Adelsheim
Vineyard in 1971.
The archives at Linfield tell a story of a
close-knit community of winemakers who
relied on each other, and a bit of luck, to build
their family businesses into wineries with
international prestige.
In 2008, the Oregon wine community was
rocked by news of Lett’s death. And since
then a number of the early pioneers have
passed the day-to-day operation of their win-
eries on to their children.
That generational churn is underlining the
importance of the Linfield archive’s work in
gathering papers and conducting interviews
with the surviving pinot innovators.
“We’re doing something which is going to
help the industry because you want to pre-
serve these documents,” Peterson said. The
archive also provides a place for students
such as Terran Sobel-Smith to polish their
archivist chops and learnmore about the his-
tory of the region.
Sobel-Smith spent the summer at the ar-
chive full time and expects he’ll stick around
during the rest of his tenure at Linfield.This
coming year, the archive will be able to fund
even more student internships, thanks to an
$8,000 grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust.
The grant also will fund the nuts and bolts of
running an archive—cotton gloves, acid-free
paper and boxes.
For Sobel-Smith, shivering in the cold, dry
archive is worth it when he thinks about the
change that the people he’s documenting
have made in Oregon and the world.
“They have created this facet of Oregon
history and it’s created a new name for Ore-
gon and I think that’s phenomenal,” Sobel-
Smith said. “I think everyone should know at
least something about that.”
Linfield College’s Oregon Wine History Archive project
brings history of regional pinot noir to the web
cellars
STELLAR
Janis Checchia and Myron Redford, co-owners of Amity
Vineyards, work in the vineyard in 1974.
PHoto
Courtesy of amity Vineyards
Susan Sokol Blosser pours a glass of wine in
the winery’s tasting room in 1979.
Courtesy of sokol Blosser Winery