Oregon’s Willamette Valley is bordered by mountains running north to south on its western flank. Much of the valley floor is low-lying floodplain, so that edge is readily visible, more or less forming the western horizon for 120 miles, especially when seen from Highway 99W, the through line of civilization that runs from Portland to Eugene.
West of 99W, things get weird. Hills rise sharply, huge and forested, so dark in afternoon shadow they look as if they’re swallowing light. Evidence of logging is starkly visible; on many ridgelines, the jagged stubble of partly felled trees juts into the sky like the remnants of a bad haircut.
This is the Coast Range, formed by tectonic collisions 65 million years ago, when the Juan de Fuca plate dove beneath the continent. The resulting uplift bequeathed a jumble of ridges, valleys folds and buckles ranging in elevation from 2,500 to just over 4,000 feet. Running the length of the state, the Range serves as a critical buffer between the ocean and the vineyard slopes of the Willamette Valley.
With a few notable exceptions, the Coast Range is defined by this role, as a buffer, a barrier, a regulator of inland temperatures and weather, and the Range itself has largely been considered too cool to plant. But climate change has altered that calculus, and after last year’s heat event, where temperatures soared in late June, planting vines in places once thought inhospitable became a talking point. Where to do this, and whether it’s a good idea, is another matter.
Elevation
Development in the Coast Range isn’t exactly new. One of the valley’s first vineyard sites, David Hill Vineyard, was planted west of Portland in 1965. There, Charles Coury, a contemporary of the Eyrie’s David Lett, planted Alsace varieties on a long south-facing parcel near Forest Grove. Other sites saw vines go in the ground in the early eighties; Wren, Dai Crisp’s home vineyard in Philomath, was planted then by his father, also on the advice of Lett.
If David Hill is the oldest Coast Range development, King Estate is probably the largest. Ed King, Jr., started planting the vineyard in 1991 on the site of an old horse farm and pasture; the property’s 1,000 acres are situated where the Coast Range creeps south and east, forming the southern border of the Willamette Valley. Ray Nuclo, who farms King Estate’s vineyard under biodynamics, refers to this part of the Coast Range as the West Slope; the property rises in elevation from 700 to nearly 1,200 feet, higher and cooler than most other parts of the Valley. That worked for King’s founder, Ed, Jr., who sought to kick-start an ambitious pinot gris program.
Nuclo thinks the coolness of the King Estate site has as much to do with its proximity to the coast as with its elevation. “There’s a breeze pattern that comes in every afternoon like clockwork,” he says. It cools the entire property, lingering into the early morning hours. Nuclo, who buys fruit all over the Willamette Valley, knows few properties as cool as the estate. Whites are accordingly nervy, with low alcohols and high natural acids; estate reds are firmly structured and long-lived.
Both here and at Crisp’s Wren Vineyard nearby, spring frosts were once a scourge, and are no longer. “It gets a bit warmer in that early-May window,” says Crisp, “and that changes our ability to ripen fruit homogeneously—before November.”
Wind
Much as in California, Oregon’s Coast Range impedes the complex and chaotic weather systems generated by the Pacific Ocean. But Oregon has far fewer incursion routes than California: the band of mountains is wider, more rugged, and often higher, making the traverse of ocean breezes more circuitous and meandering.
Instead, ocean breezes pick their way inland via low-lying drainages that have come to be known as corridors. The largest and best known of these is the Van Duzer Corridor, which links the coastal town of Lincoln City to the Willamette Valley by way of the circuitous Salmon River drainage. Winds hurtle down this pathway and spill into the region with exceptional speed and force, dispersing across the Willamette Valley’s entire middle flank. Where you are in relation to the daily incursion is terroir-defining for large swaths of three of the valley’s main appellations, Yamhill-Carlton, McMinnville, and the Eola–Amity Hills. A fourth, the newly established Van Duzer Corridor AVA, lies directly in its path. There are 18 vineyards in the new appellation, including Johan, one of only six wineries based there.
On a cold clear winter’s day in January, Johan Vineyard’s Morgan Beck and I stood on a knoll which passes, absurdly, for a helicopter pad on the property. (When used for this purpose, the winds nearly prevent the craft from landing.) Johan’s 85 acres lie on a stretch of undulating terrain just east of the Range known as the Perrydale Hills, which serves as the front line for the Van Duzer Corridor winds. Just east of where we’re standing, the Eola–Amity Hills act like an ill-fitting cap on a gushing spigot. Johan is right in the spigot. “We are late with everything,” says Beck. “Budbreak is late April, veraison is late August. We’re harvesting into October. Most of the Eola–Amity Hills—” she points to them, just two miles away—“are ten to thirteen days earlier than here.” The winds diminish disease pressure on the vines, which makes Beck’s biodynamic farming more sustainable.
Winds are the defining factor: from our promontory Beck points out a pattern to the trees lining a small creek on the property: all of them are crooked, their trunks bowed east. It’s easy to imagine how the same force batters grapevine canopies and thickens fruit skins. That aeolic impact, along with area’s sedimentary soils interspersed with non-native granite (this is where the Missoula floods left behind the most erratic deposits of any site in the valley), gives the wines a textural breadth with lifted aromatics and a striking phenolic character.
“You’re starting to encroach on the last remaining high-functioning habitat for a lot of species, which undermines the functionality of this region.”
Nicole Maness, Willamette Partnership
Soils
Interest in the Coast Range geology is nascent, but there are geologists poking around in the foothills who believe that the soils in the Coast Range—largely sedimentary seabed—may be the most compelling in the valley. Such efforts have been spearheaded by the research team at Rose & Arrow Estate, who have spent the last decade looking for and isolating interesting lithologies found in Willamette soils; in the Coast Range, they’ve initiated a hunt for a most elusive goal in Oregon: limestone.
Rose & Arrow was founded by Mark Tarlov in 2014 as an offshoot of his Chapter 24 Vineyards, to make wines from vines that clearly expressed distinctive pockets of Oregon soil. He enlisted Pedro Parra, an agronomist and soil scientist, to set out to explore the places where rock was in the process of breaking down into soil. But other iterations kept surfacing.
In 2015 the team began making wine from a vineyard in the Coast Range called Stardance, most of which was going into Chapter 24’s Flood, sourced from pinot noir grown on sedimentary soil. But the Stardance parcel always seemed like an outlier—giving a pinot noir that was firm, reductive, savory and elusive. So, the team began to dig pits, and found a band of basalt beneath a sedimentary lens. For the next three vintages they made a wine called Yamhill Close, a haunting, olive-scented pinot noir that captured a firm volcanic expression with lush and spicy sedimentary elements. (They lost access to the vineyard in 2018.)
Tarlov, Parra and their researchers, by this time including geologists Stephen Cox and Frank Sousa, would go on to find many such mash-ups, and started to think that the Coast Range was a likely source for its own set of anomalies: specifically, veins of calcium carbonate and limestone, those elusive mineral elements that make Burgundy Burgundy.
“We know there’s limestone in Oregon,” says Cox, citing geological surveys conducted for other industries, like the cement industry. But limestone has yet to be found in places conducive to good winegrowing. “It’s yet to be determined if we’re going to find a site that meets our expectations for microclimate, slope, etc.” he says. Parra, Cox, Tarlov, and their on-the-ground winemaker, Felipe Ramirez, all began planning a more comprehensive search for limestone, when the pandemic interrupted their progress. Then, in late 2020, Mark Tarlov succumbed to cancer.
Cox remains optimistic that the Coast Range contains undiscovered lithologies, which could one day produce unique wines. Indeed, he thinks that the Coast Range, a place that was once thought to be marginal, could prove to be an ideal area to study climate-related variability, as well as to compare soil variations in otherwise similar vineyards. “No agricultural enterprise is as sensitive as winemaking to these very small changes,” he says. Then again, enormous changes in the climate may make such explorations trivial, in the Coast Range and elsewhere.
The Future
On June 26, 2021, a pile-up of high-pressure atmospheric cells from Alaska to Canada’s Hudson Bay stalled weather systems near the border of Washington State and British Columbia, causing temperatures to rise in the Willamette Valley from the low eighties to nearly 110 degrees in a matter of hours. Vineyard managers watched as the mercury soared and most, working without irrigation, had no choice but to wait it out—for over a week. Those near the Coast Range fared slightly better. “We didn’t have the extreme heat as long in the day,” says Wren’s Dai Crisp. “We had more air movement because of the marine influence.”
Still, anyone who lived through the “heat dome” began to wonder if the days of Oregon’s identity as a cool-climate region were numbered. Several growers told me they consider the Coast Range as the next frontier, even as scientists, environmentalists and land-use experts question the wisdom of such thinking.
Oregon’s counties and its state government devote considerable effort to analyzing impacts on land use and finding ways for the state’s competing stakeholders to coexist. Some of those stakeholders are non-profit agencies, including the Oak Accord, led by Nicole Maness of the Willamette Partnership, which seeks to preserve the oak forest that forms the eastern border of the Coast Range. That borderland often proves to be an ideal environment for grapevines. As if speaking to winegrowers, Maness says, “You’re starting to encroach on the last remaining high-functioning habitat for a lot of species, which undermines the functionality of this region.”
Sarah Reif, Habitat Administrator for Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife is tasked with more big-picture thinking when it comes to the Coast Range. That includes mitigating the impact that logging has on the region; the industry has dominated the Coast Range for well over a century and has long played an outsized role in disrupting the environment—sometimes permanently. Adding the effects of any agricultural development on already threatened watersheds, salmon and wildlife habitats is something Reif’s team takes very seriously. “It’s often ‘death by one-thousand cuts.’” she says. “One vineyard will not in and of itself impact the watershed. But the more you put in, the more cumulative the effect; that’s what we need to guard against. But how do you regulate who is allowed to develop a vineyard? How do you manage the fairness of it?”
A habitat expert for fish and wildlife, Reif is working to create or mark off refugia for the salmon and wildlife that populate the Coast Range. Refugia are places in the natural world that remain viable habitats for wildlife populations which once enjoyed much larger ranges. But such places are viable only if they remain untrammeled. As stakeholders draw up plans and boundaries for a species’ last stand, it becomes hard for them to justify the existence of yet another vineyard producing expensive pinot noir.
For Reif, events like the Heat Dome are marks of how close we are to systemic collapse. “We need to have a global conversation about the hard decisions we need to make about our shared climate future,” she says. “That future once felt distant; now it’s starting to feel not so far off.”
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
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This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2022.
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