Wine Atlas

Training your sniffer is the most difficult and demanding task for any wine enthusiast. But it also is the most rewarding. Flavor begins and ends here.

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Doug Wagner is baffled. When he opened ClearWeather Winery in Missoula two years ago, he expected his wine-tasting room to attract mostly local residents.

Instead, tourists are the ones who find his place, off North Reserve.

Mike Greener Missoulian - Judy Chapman, owner of the Lolo Peak Winery in Missoula, tastes a glass of Strawberry Wine from a 500-gallon tank. The winery makes more than seven different wines, all from fruit bought from local vendors...

Maybe that makes sense after all. On vacation, we play. We stop to wander through antique shops or take a hike and stop at an out-of-the-way grill on the way home. In short, it is time to enjoy simple pleasures, sometimes even the ones in our own backyards.

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Twenty-eight local charities received checks totaling $268,000 from Cincinnati International Wine Festival treasurer Barry T. Oppelt at a reception at Kenwood Country Club. The funds were raised at this year's wine festival in March.

Some 75 guests, including wine festival board president Connie Wiles and executive director Michelle Egbers, were on hand for the celebration.

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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.

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About a dozen Oregon and Washington grape growers, winemakers and researchers are joining leaders from industry, USDA, extension and research groups throughout the United States in a new initiative launched from California.

They have spent nearly a year developing the National Grape and Wine Initiative at strategic planning conferences held in May and November in 2004, and January 2005.

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