A move from Boston to Salem resulted in covering food and beverage with emphasis on agriculture: hazelnuts, apples, nursery trees, and wine grapes. Fieldwork in the Willamette Valley involved walking vineyards, feeling soil, watching bud break, and observing autumnal vines. Sensory training included identifying jasmine, tobacco, cloves, and specific flavors in wine. Winemakers and viticulturalists explained techniques such as carbonic maceration, terroir, and lees, and demonstrated grafting and pruning. Extensive tasting of pinot noir revealed diverse profiles tied to weather and harvest. The region has attracted investment and tourism, while sales fell and new acres and climate pressures rose.
So, like any good reporter, I started making phone calls. Soon enough, I was trudging through the vineyards of the Willamette Valley. I felt soil between my fingers, witnessed the electric green of bud break, gawked at the butterscotch cascades of autumnal vines. I whiffed ramekins of jasmine tea leaves and tobacco and cloves, learning how to identify specific flavors in the glass. I listened as winemakers explained carbonic maceration and terroir and lees, let viticulturalists show me their grafted stems and pruned leaves.
Some were mushroomy and savory, others demure and floral, a few midnight dark in the glass with a sweetness like sticky prunes. I loved the way those bottles seemed to trap time. A rainy, cold harvest resulted in a wine that tasted like the forest. A sunny one created a wine the color of raspberry popsicles. And I drank with the farmers and craftspeople who grew and made those wines-in garages, in folding chairs, in tasting rooms, in the dirt.
The region is now home to a handful of high-end hotels clearly designed for a wine tourist crowd. Prix fixes proliferate at the region's restaurants and wineries. But this isn't a clear Cinderella story. People are drinking less. Oregon wine sales dropped between 2023 and 2024, while vineyard workers planted hundreds of new acres of wine grapes in Oregon that same year.
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