Finally got out to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to do some wine tastin’, picture takin’, and relaxin’. The first thing I noticed while driving from winery to winery is all the dysentery is how they have other stuff planted besides grapes. Drive through any major wine region around the world and you’re likely to find every available square inch under vine. The Willamette Valley has a feel that Oregon has some other stuff going on besides wine, like hazelnuts.

Sidebar: hazelnuts taste nothing like you’d expect mostly because all you’ve been exposed to is hazelnut flavoring in your coffee. Like most other things, the flavor has drifted far from the source material.

We stayed in Carlton, OR at the aptly named Carlton Inn. The Carlton Inn is everything a Bed and Breakfast should be: nice, outside space, inside space, friendly, and good food. The proprietors knew just about everyone in the valley and had tons of recommendations. Downtown Carlton – a one-road stretch that is about 2000 feet long – features several tasting rooms from surrounding wineries. This is typical of small-town Willamette Valley life, the towns have tastings so that you don’t need to go driving through the hillside like a maniac. You are free to stumble through their streets like a maniac, as it were.

In order to taste a wide swath of wines, we stopped into
The Horse Radish in downtown Carlton. The staff was so friendly and so happy to see us I thought they actually knew The Wife from somewhere. We got a big cheese plate, a flight of Oregon Pinots from the tasting bar, and settled onto one of the couches to watch the afternoon to by.

Out in the valley, stops of note included Anne Amie and Argyle. Anne Amie sits a few miles outside of Carlton. The Wife and I tasted while the tasting room staff allowed The Daughter to crawl around the room unfettered. Anne Amie’s Pinot Gris was rated best in Oregon by the New York Honkin’ Times. After tasting it, I agreed. Their Pinot Gris is blended with grapes from several different sites to give it a rounder, softer feel than one often finds in a Pinot Gris. This one has it all: fruit, acid, floral, and there is some wine in there too…

Notice no Maryland on the list.

Besides being home to the Argyle Winery tasting room, the Town of Dundee also lays claim to the biggest traffic bottleneck in the valley. Oregon Route 99W goes from four lanes to two and the traffic frustrates both locals and tourists alike. Fortunately we watched all this unfold form the safety of the Argyle Winery front porch. Argyle’s flight took you through three levels of their Pinot Noir and tossed in some of their fantastic sparkling wines. Theirs was the most sophisticated and Napa-like of the tasting rooms we visited. Nice, polished operation.

In total, we were floored by the quality we found in and around the Willamette Valley. Oregon and go wine for wine with almost any region in the world and when considered on a price-to-quality ratio, the region is a treasure of good wine and good times. It’s not just Pinot Noir either. Syrah and Cabernet (what Oregonian’s call “warm weather grapes”) thrive around Southern Oregon and the wineries pour a range of everything. Willamette Valley is a must visit for wine lovers.

The Carlton Inn
648 West Main Street
Carlton, OR 97111
(503) 852-7506

The Horse Radish
211 West Main Street
Carlton, OR 97111
(503) 852-6656

Anne Amie
6580 NE Mineral Springs Road
Carlton, OR 97111

Argyle Winery
691 Highway 99W
Dundee, Oregon 97115

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Running a winery includes a lot more than just making wine. These days you need a tasting room, a wine club, online retailing and shipping*, Twitter, Facebook and in between all this you have to turn out good wine and a good price. Much like running anything alcohol related in Maryland, putting together all of these components means navigating an extraordinarily complicated sea of regulations, each with an enforcer ready to fine you if you turn the wrong direction. Worse, the regulations vary from county to county. Wineries in one county may offer tables to sit in the tasting room, something which may be prohibited in the next county over.

Enter the Maryland Winery Modernization Act. The Act seeks to clarify what a winery can and cannot do. Included are provisions to establish a permit for selling wine at farmers markets and allowing the serving of specified foods in a wineries tasting room.

The Act, looking all but certain to pass, has picked up a heavy tailwind of support in the wake of the doomed voyage of the RMS Wine Shipping. Some legislators who oppose direct shipping have called the Modernization Act a compromise, as if the liquor lobby is throwing us winos a bone and hoping we’ll be happy enough to let direct shipping slide. “We’ll pass this,” they’re saying, “If you guys will finally stfu about direct shipping.”

More coverage of the act from the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Business Journal.

*Not applicable in Maryland

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I hope the filmmakers did the right thing and didn’t futz with the movie too much (SLAM CUT HERE, MONTAGE, SPINNING CAMERA, ANOTHER MONTAGE, GO!). When you have a compelling subject, it’s best just to shut up and let it just happen.

Via Dirty South Wine. Link to the movie’s website.

Since then I have published 217 posts (and at least 400 typos) about Maryland and Virginia but plenty of others about everything else in the wine universe. I was going to go back and include a top 5 list of my favorite posts, but WordPress is slow today and I don’t feel like clicking back and back and back. If you have a favorite, drop a line in the comments.

Wine blogging, in general, underwent a boom in 2008 and early 2009 and now seems to be trailing off. Initially struggling for respect and recognition, the trumpet sound of the Wine Blogger has quieted. There just isn’t all that much interesting to talk about. Bloggers that post early and often have to reach for asinine topics and wild tangents just to keep their fingers moving on the keyboard. This is, at least, preferred to the dreaded “I bought it, I drank it” post which dominates much of the wine blogoshpere.

So if wine blogs aren’t interesting, what of the subject that they cover? Is wine interesting enough to merit books and blogs and newspaper columns, all pretty much saying the same thesis over and over: “Wine isn’t all that complicated!” The fact is that wine is both infinitely complex and stupidly boring. Tasting rooms are so typical that if you’re seen one, you’re seen them all. Maybe one has cheese. Another, classical music playing. They all have a Chard that isn’t in the California Style, an oak monster, a fruit bomb, and an overpriced reserve wine. Join the wine club. Wine critics decry the death of the tasting note, but the fact is that critics are getting so absurdly flowery in their notes that you need a dictionary just to decode what your wine will taste like. There are only so many words you can use to describe a wine, especially when 95% of wine is produced with no soul, slapped with an authentic looking label, marked up to $25, and sold out immediately. No wino like to say it, but slapping a 91 on one wine and an 89 on another tells me which you preferred. That’s all we really want to know.

But while it all looks and feels the same on the surface, every glass of wine is different from the last. Even from the same bottle, filling up your glass and taking in a big whiff of the fermented grape juice gives you something different than the last time. That’s what makes wine different from anything else. It comes from the Earth, ferments in some oak and as long as it hasn’t been messed with too much, comes out feeling authentic and whole. Enjoy the simplicity and the complexity, and don’t forget to share it with someone else.

I posted this on OWC but it fell on deaf ears. Maybe I didn’t mention Twitter enough. Anyway, I know of some smarty-pants people that read this blog so I thought I’d throw out a 100-point-toss-up…

We have cellar management, community tasting notes, price comparisons, scores, professional reviews, message boards, etc… They’ve all been handled by the avalanche of companies entering the Wine technology space in the past few years. I haven’t seen much innovation recently. Most new companies are just retreading what has already been done. I’m a firm believer in the second-man-in theory, but c’mon fellas, let’s look alive out there. Another way for me to share notes and find places to buy my wine? Just what I was looking for…

Some problems, of course, can’t be handled by technology. Shipping to Utah? No amount of Wine 2.0 is going to get your wine in there. Want to sell wine to someone else, person-to-person? Not quite legal in most states.

Given all that, what problem facing the wine industry or wine consumers hasn’t yet been handled by technology? Do you ever find yourself raising a glass and thinking “Man, I wish I could use my iPhone right now to ___________”

Although the chart identifies the numerous ways in which underage kids gain access to alcohol, noticeably absent is any mention whatsoever of the Internet.

The post along with detailed charts and graphs can be found here.