(group applauding) (soft jazz music) - The first thing you think when you think chardonnay is, I don't know, like a lady in pearls and white gloves.

I see a yellow-ish bottle and my Aunt Shirley drank it all the time.

It's very like upper crust.

- I think people are being very pleasantly surprised by how great Oregon chardonnay can be.

- The soil here is, it's quite a steep slope and it's pretty stressful to the plant.

And the consequence of that is that it makes the vines focus on the quality their fruit.

- Chardonnay is kinda known as like this blank canvas so it's really kind of something that like a wine maker can take and turn into just about anything.

(bright upbeat music) - There's a drive within the community here to actually try to make the very best wines in the world.

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] For decades, the words Oregon wine were almost synonymous with pinot noir.

Early winemakers here saw that we had a lot in common with Burgundy, France, and if pinot did well there, it could do well here.

But pinot's cousin, chardonnay, also from Burgundy, also planted here in the early days often struggled to get noticed.

There were a few early successes but things changed in the 1980s and 90s when winemakers brought over new chardonnay clones from Europe that were easier to work with.

Fast forward to today and pinot noir still dominates but Oregon's highest ranked wine is a chardonnay.

And a new generation of winemakers and wine taste makers are exploring new possibilities for a varietal whose time is here.

(soft jazz music) - It may not feel like it but Oregon is a really big state.

It's a really big place with a lot of pockets that are still to be discovered.

So you're seeing all these different people growing this one grape and expressing it in a very different way.

What Evan is doing right now with Oregon oak is so different and interesting.

Seeing someone in their space that they both live and work in is a quite unique experience.

(soft jazz music) - So I sleep not too many feet away from my barrels and often at night when I'm cooking dinner, I'll come down and just here and there, check on these young wines because they're the only children that I have to be honest.

And they're growing very quickly.

- [Chevonne] Chablis.

(laughs) - [Evan] Yeah.

- Definitely a lot of citrus on the nose which is just really beautiful.

Like it's still on the tree.

What I'm looking for when I think of classic Oregon chardonnay is this beautiful sense of citrus and orange blossoms and sort of floral notes on the nose.

But then I'm looking for this beautiful acid that's like bringing me to a place of like wanting to have more food.

- The most important determination of any wine whether it's chardonnay or pinot or a gamay or whatever it is, is the quality of the fruit.

(soft jazz music) So we're at Koosah Vineyard, planted 2016 so it's a fairly young vineyard but there was a tremendous amount of thought that was put into the site.

So the nights get cold but there's also a counterbalance to that.

The daytime temperatures tend to be even more intense.

And then the soil type here it's volcanic and it's very rocky.

The rocks create channels.

The roots are able to dig deep fairly quick.

We're seeing these very bright acidity levels that are maintained in the grapes and yet at the same time, it's being married to these pretty powerful fruit signatures that are building into the grape.

And that combination is, in my experience, pretty rare.

80% of the wine is determined by the decision of when to pick and what you get on that particular day, what is in that berry on that particular day.

You are walking, you're thinking, sometimes there are these oh shit moments where you're like, "Oh man, we're really close, right?"

The wheels are turning immediately like what do I need to do in the next 48 hours to actually be ready to pick this?

(man speaking in Spanish) (bright upbeat music) (man speaking in Spanish) (bright upbeat music) Chardonnay is tremendously reflective of terroir from the site that it's grown in.

It's also tremendously reflective of technique from a winemaker.

When do you expose juice or wine to oxygen?

When do you not?

What type of press do you use and how do you use it?

How do you handle that juice?

And then in what kind of vessel are you fermenting?

(bright upbeat music) Every chardonnay winemaker kinda has a house style.

There's a signature.

I've sort of taken on this long-term exploration of using our local oak species to age some of my wines.

The tannins in French oak you tend to feel in your cheeks and in your gums.

Oregon oak, structurally, the tannins tend to sit down the top of the pallet and they build towards the tip of the tongue and they linger there and they create this sort of movement forward on the palate.

It's fun to work with.

- [Narrator] Oregon has 23 officially recognized wine growing regions.

Wine is a reflection of place but also of the people who make it.

For some, it's a dream come true.

(soft jazz music) - Sofia, I feel like you meet her and you are immediately drawn to her.

She not only tends to the vines but tends to the people making those wines and growing those grapes.

- I met Ryan McKay in Redwood City, California in the Silicon Valley.

We were working together in a software company.

- We shared that passion for food and wine and used to travel the wine country all the time and I guess we wanted to be here full-time.

- So every time we were coming to visit his parents, we were going wine tasting.

So I fell in love with the wines and I fell in love with Ryan.

We were dreaming at that time to invest our money in some land and grow grapes and make wine.

And people, they were calling us, "You guys are crazy "because you don't know anything about it.

"You just drink wine."

There was no vineyard before so it was just completely empty.

And I asked Ryan, "What are we going to do now?

"Like, do you know how we're gonna start?"

And he's like, "I have no idea."

- Got our hands on as many different good clones of chardonnay as we possibly could and we mixed those up so it makes just a really kind of complex wine.

We're really happy with it.

(soft jazz music) - [Ivan] That's about it, paperwork has been started.

- I think that the story of wine is the vineyard, right?

The people that take care of your grapes.

(soft Latin jazz music) They get up at 5:30 a.m. in the morning, they get here at six and then they're working with frost, with cold, with wind, with rain, with heat, you know, they're here.

(Ivan speaking in Spanish) (soft Latin jazz music) I wanted to empower them to feel more ownership of the work that they were doing, to feel proud, to feel that the work that they do it was the fundamental and the foundation of the wine.

(bright upbeat music) We started with a formal program just to give them back to our people and to give them that knowledge and to empower them.

So they taste wine in the program.

We teach 'em how to appreciate the wine.

We give them some options so they can advance in the wine industry as well.

(bright upbeat music) - It's pretty hard work.

You know, you're carrying 20 pounds on each hand and you're running and yeah, it's pretty impressive.

The whole check goes to rent and that's why they work so much 'cause they have to in order to be able to, for one, send some money back to their family and two, maintain themselves here.

The fruit goes a long ways, it gets touched several times.

A lot of people devote their lives to it.

- When you get it all right, you've just got this convergence of what people can do and what nature can do in working together.

And you get this beautiful wines that are crisp and bright but they're gonna have a richness and a texture that really kinda fills your whole mouth.

That's kinda chardonnay perfection.

- [Narrator] Compared to the centuries of family owned estates in Europe, Oregon's wine scene is young but it's old enough that people who grew up in the industry are now carrying it forward into a new future.

- We've established our wine making protocols for pinot and now we've been establishing our wine making protocols for chardonnay for some time.

And it's world class at this point.

(soft jazz music) As a kid the last thing I think I wanted to do was go back into the wine industry, hanging out with your parents while they're tasting wine and talking about it incessantly.

I got my undergraduate degree in chemistry.

What else are you gonna do with a chemistry degree, right?

You're gonna run a lab somewhere or you're gonna do something abstract with it.

And this is that abstraction that I chose.

My first vintage, I intentionally chose not to have it here in Oregon because I've already spent so much time growing up here.

So I went to New Zealand for my first full vintage.

I worked in Sonoma at a place called Hanzell.

I went to Burgundy for six months on a scholarship internship there.

Came back in 2009 and started working for the family.

Wine making practices are the same from country to country, there's not that much difference in the way people make wine 200 years ago in France versus now in Oregon.

I mean, the techniques are kinda the same.

You get some grapes and you ferment them and you squish 'em together and you let it age in a barrel and- - She makes it sound so simple.

- It's really easy, anybody can do it.

Balance is the key.

Acid, alcohol, sugar, tannin, all of them have a different balance with each other.

It is a little finesse between the art and the science.

We've been working on it for a while.

- Yeah, we've been doing some stuff.

- Welcome to the group.

Thank you for acknowledging it.

(jazz music) - Here in Oregon, especially in the Willamette Valley, being in the place where the wine is being produced, grown and made and meeting the people and the hands that are touching it, is such an experience.

Just as a culture, we're quite disconnected from where our food and our consumerables come from and I think that's what wine is sort of here for.

And just going to one winery, tasting the wines, just being in the space, it's pretty cool.

(jazz music crescendo) - [Mac] Hi, I'm Mac and I produced this episode.

I grew up here in Oregon but I've always been more of a beer guy.

Making this video opened my eyes to how wine reflects this place I love.

And that's our goal with OPB Superabundant; to help us all better connect to the ingredients and people that sustain us.

We do that every week in our Superabundant newsletter.

Sign up now at opb.org/superabundant.

We'll help you know what's good in Northwest food with delicious recipes for what to do with it.

OPB members make all of this possible.

Thank you.

And cheers.

(bright drum music)