Take a sideways sip trip for Oregon’s Pinot
By Wine Atlas, Saturday 25 June 2005 :: Wine - United-States :: #11 :: rss
Luscious to drink, intoxicating if you’re not careful, wine can also be intimidating to the uninitiated. Just think of how Paul Giamatti’s unforgettably fussy wine snob, Miles Raymond, opined about Pinot Noir in 2004’s wine-film hit Sideways: “Its flavours, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and…ancient on the planet.”
Now that’s some heavy talk for a bunch of grapes.
Here’s a secret from a real expert, one of Oregon’s learned sommeliers: “The only thing that matters is that you like what you’re drinking.” Tysan Pierce should know: she’s one of the state’s few full-time sommeliers and the wine director of Portland’s largest wine cellar, the 500-bottle cave at the Heathman Hotel.
Maybe Oregon is starting to agree with her. The balloon goblet is threatening to replace the coffee mug as Portland’s unofficial emblem, as new chic-but-casual wine bars continue to pop up and the number of wineries in the state has nearly quadrupled—from 78 to more than 300—in the past decade.
More than 5,200 hectares of grapes were growing in the Willamette Valley and Oregon’s other wine-producing regions last year, and most of them carried the state’s most cantankerous and gifted fruit: those Sideways-approved pinot grapes. If the state had a mistress, her name would be Pinot Noir. An intemperate, complex burn of rich red-fruit flavours, this delicate powerhouse has been turning heads toward Oregon since gaining international recognition in the mid-’90s. Pinot Noir and her lighter sisters, Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc, are fashioned from a grape so finicky it can only be grown in a handful of places around the world...
By kelly clarkeSource : straight.com
