Wine
How Revino is Reshaping the use of Wine Bottles—and the Oregon Wine Industry
The 2023 Whole Cluster Pinot Noir from Willamette Valley Vineyards has notes of candied cherries, cinnamon, and sweet tobacco. But its defining feature may be its container: a glass bottle designed specifically for reuse. Made by 3-year-old Oregon startup Revino—the first company to launch a reusable glass wine bottle in the U.S.—the Pinot Noir’s green Burgundy-style bottle is sturdy enough that it can be used, sanitized, and refilled up to 50 times.
Border Land: the Columbia Gorge's Budding Wine Scene
It’s a beautiful evening when my husband and I arrive at Buona Notte, a winery in Cascade Locks, Oregon, for a late spring feast. After winemaker Graham Markel, 40, greets us with a pour of his pet nat, we wander over to a table piled with melon and prosciutto. Candlelit tables festooned with wildflowers are soon filled with platters of green salad, grilled potatoes with salsa verde, and roasted pork. Soon we're chatting with Chase Silcocks, a winemaker at Little Bastions and grape grower Jason Mann. The dinner was to celebrate the seven farmers Markel sources grapes from—and without whom he would not be able to make his delicious Italian-style wines like Sangiovese, Pinot Grigio, and a rustic rosé made of Sangiovese and Dolcetto.
Oregon's Not-to-miss Willamette Valley Wine Scene
I’m in McMinnville (population: 34,000), in the heart of Oregon wine country, sharing pizza with the Mayor. As we chat about how she got into politics, she greets every person who walks past our table at Mac Market by name. 42-year old Remy Drabkin is not your typical mayor of a small agricultural town. First, she’s queer. Second, she’s been a winemaker since 2006, known for her Italian-style reds including an estate Lagrein. When Drabkin was young, her mom cooked at Nick’s Italian Café, where all the winemakers hung out. She’d have Thanksgiving with the Lett family (of Eyrie). 4th of July was at the Adelsheims. At the tender age of 14, she worked harvest at Ponzi, where idolized the Ponzi daughters. That’s when she cemented her aspirations to be a winemaker. Today, at her 29-acre property in the Dundee Hills, she has 7 acres planted and sources fruit from other vineyards.
Back then, in the mid-90s, Oregon wine pioneers like the Letts and the Ponzis knew what the rest of the world is waking up to now. The soil and climate of Oregon’s Willamette Valley—the elements that make up terroir—yields grapes that make some of the finest wines in the world. These families and others who arrived decades earlier are still making incredible wines. But Oregon’s wine industry has grown dramatically over the past fifty years—today, there are over 700 wineries in the Willamette Valley, the 150-mile long area that runs from Portland to Eugene. And over the past 15 years a new crop of winemakers—many from different cultural and racial backgrounds—have entered the scene. From a Black former sommelier from Per Se to a Japanese immigrant who started her career in Germany, these and others are injecting a new energy into the Valley. They’re also attracting a younger, more diverse audience to the region.
Climate-friendly wine: Four tips for sustainable drinking
It’s bleakest January, snow covering the sidewalks, and you see a watermelon in the grocery store. You don’t have to be a sustainability expert to see there’s an issue here: we know that produce shipped from far away has a higher footprint than local, seasonal food.
But what about wine? After all, the wine section of any store is a veritable tour of the planet. Can it be kind to the planet at the same time?
“Growing grapes and making wine is probably one of the lowest impact agriculture crops in the world,” says wine climatologist Greg Jones, Ph.D., who recently became the CEO of Abacela, his family’s winery in Southern Oregon. But “the fact that wine is shipped all over the world is just as bad as the watermelon being in a store in New York City in January.”
Become a Co-ferment Connoisseur
Cider is having a moment. The lightly alcoholic beverage, once relegated to the beer fridges of grocery stores, now appears on restaurant menus and holds its own as an establishment concept: a half dozen cider bars operate in town. Despite dipping beer and wine sales, sales of regional cider brands are up 5.7 percent from last year, according to Nielsen.
Shattered Glass
Oregon’s Bottle Bill, passed in 1971, is famous for being America’s first bottle bill. It was also the country’s first “extended producer responsibility” program, before that term was even coined. In the bill, legislators made beverage distributors (or manufacturers who self-distribute) responsible for reimbursing grocery stores for the refund value. Consumers then pay the deposit when they buy beer or other beverages, but they recoup that when they return the bottles.
The whole point of the deposit is to incentivize consumers to reliably return the bottles and cans — and it has worked. The Bottle Bill has undergone many updates over the years: adding bottled water (2009); the Green Bag program (2010); juice, tea, coconut water and other beverage containers (2018); and canned wine (2022). In 2017 the deposit doubled to 10 cents per bottle, resulting in a spike in returns. According to the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC), Oregon had a bottle redemption rate of 85.5% in 2022.
Doing What Comes Naturally
The first time I met winemaker Nate Ready, he was pouring his wines at Pairings wine bar in Portland, Oregon. With his long salt-and-pepper beard and intense yet humble manner, Ready reminded me of a cross between Rasputin and a young Dumbledore — if Dumbledore were a wizard of wine. I’d tasted natural wines before (that is, wines made from organic grapes using native yeast and minimal intervention), but these, from Hiyu Wine Farm in the Columbia River Gorge, were remarkable. One was a field blend of red varietals, another was a pét-nat, and yet another was an orange wine that had had skin contact for 100 days. They had one thing in common: They all tasted alive.
“You taste his wines, and they are unlike anything on the West Coast,” says Brian McClintic, founder and owner of Viticole, a wine club that creates custom blends with organic producers here and abroad. “You can’t really compare them to anything; they’re so distinctive.”
Whereas some winemakers see a division between winemaking and farming, for Ready, the two are inseparable. When you visit Hiyu, high above the Hood River, you get the impression right away that Ready and his co-founder, China Tresemer, work using the principles of biodynamic farming. Plump pigs joyfully stampede down the slope of the vineyard, and ducks, speckled guinea fowl, and Dexter cows keep the grasses down and fertilize the vines. Their guiding philosophy, however, is permaculture, an even more holistic way of farming that uses a diversity of plants and animals to create resiliency. The farm, a former pear orchard with a view of Mount Hood, evokes an English smallholding farm. McClintic, with a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien, calls it “Shire-y.”
