Walking the Original Vines of The Eyrie Vineyards with Owner and Winemaker Jason Lett
In the Summer of 2021, I had a chance to visit the Original Vines of The Eyrie Vineyards with Owner and Winemaker Jason Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards. In this long video, shot amongst the Original Vines, Jason Lett discusses the terroir of the vineyard, the effect of a variety of soil types, the benefits and challenges of own-rooted grapevines, and a little of the Lett family history..
I’m very proud of this video as I believe that it communicates not only a lot of superb information about one of the world’s most important vineyard sites, but also expresses what I felt about visiting it.
Special Thanks to Amy McCandlish, who made it all possible.
Enjoy the 22 minute video or check out the transcript. *The video is way better.
Note: Transcript was created by a third party service and I’ve endeavored to clean up the spelling of ‘wine words.’ Any persistent errors are mine alone and not Jason Lett’s. Or, watch the video. It is awesome, with moving pictures, music, and you get to see Jason in his element.
Transcript:
Austin Beeman:
It's 6:30 in the morning, and I am headed out to visit a place that has always been really special to me. I'm going to be visiting the original vines of Eyrie Vineyard with owner and winemaker, Jason Lett. There are very few vineyards that are as important as this one, vineyards that have planted the seed that would spring up into an entire wine industry. I've never had a chance to visit and today we're going to go there and hopefully learn a lot about it and discover what makes it so exciting.
Jason Lett:
Hi, I'm Jason Lett with the Eyrie Vineyards. I'm standing here in front of the original vineyard site in the Dundee Hills.
So we're located in Oregon. Oregon, sort of geographically in the United States, second down on the left, we're between Washington and California over by the Pacific coast. And the Pacific coast is actually this way to the west of us and to the east of us is the Great Basin desert, and we are in a valley between two ranges of mountains that separate us from two hostile climates. The Pacific ocean over there, very cool, very wet, 10 feet of rain a year. The desert over there, that's where all our hot weather comes, on this beautiful sunny day in August. We're going to get some of that heat from the desert, but most of that heat is blocked from us by what's called the Cascade Range.
So we're in this little magical pocket right in between there and the Dundee Hills, if you kind of look at the Willamette Valley as a triangle, is located kind of up here, up in the top third sort of scooted over to the west, and you can almost look at the Dundee Hills like a fist. One of our larger producers Stoller Vineyards is wrapped around the thumb here. Eyrie and Outcrop, the two vineyards that we're standing at from Eyrie right now, are located on the forefinger and up this forefinger we also have our Roland Green and our Daphne Vineyard. And then down below on the middle finger, below the Archery Summit Winery, we have our Sister's Vineyard. So we have five vineyards all together in the Dundee Hills, ranging in a range of elevation from 200 feet down here at the Sisters Vineyard up to 900 feet at the Daphne Vineyard.
In the Dundee Hills, as you go up in elevation, as you do when you go up through our vineyards, three things happen, there are three changes. The first thing that happens is you change soils, the second thing that happens is that things get windier, and then the third thing that happens is that things get cooler.
So the higher you go, the cooler things get. Where we're standing right now is a great place to talk about soils, so we're standing right at the interface of six different soils. We've got three volcanic soils and three sedimentary soils. The volcanic soils are all sort of collectively known in this group as Jory soils, but actually if you start getting down and refining in that group, chemically they're all the same but they differ in their depth.
Right now we're standing on a combination of Jory, Nekia, and Gelderman, and so those are soils typified by the depth of their top soils in descending order. So Nekia being the thinnest top soil and Gelderman being the ... I mean, excuse me, Jory being the thickest. All of those top soils are perched on top of basalt cobble. Basalt is not a very porous rock and so it actually tends to capture the rain water that we get copious amounts of in the winter and hold it all through the summer in those little cracks between the cobbles, and so that's what the vines are accessing. You see these vines behind us, they're very green, very healthy in spite of this being a dry summer. It's because they're tapped into those deep sources.
"The other three soils here are going to be sedimentary soils starting with kind of over the top, the Missoula flood soils from about 15,000 years ago. And then if you look behind me, you'll see that we're standing ... There's a little temporary stream bed behind us, that runs water in the winter and brings with its small amounts of silt, and those silts build up and create the Dayton and Amity soils. So those are the three sedimentary soils and they overleaf the top of the volcanic soils, and depending on your elevation, you get varying sort of quotients of sedimentary or volcanic until you get so high, that finally you're on pure volcanic.
"The other things that happen as you go up in elevation in the Dundee Hills is not just that soil change, but also more wind. So where we're standing right now, we receive winds from the west and those winds usually kick up in the afternoon, six or seven hours from now, and they get stronger through the evening and they bring with them much cooler temperatures.
So here in the Willamette Valley, we can have a high temperature as we're going to have today in the mid 90s, but then an evening temperature in the mid 50s, so that's a 40 degree temperature shift and that really helps our acidities here, but it's that wind that carries the cool weather to us. And the higher you go, the windier things get, and the bigger that daily shift is.
Finally, the third thing that happens is that things just get cooler, and this happens everywhere, the higher and elevation you go, the cooler things get. So like our Daphne Vineyard, right at the peak of the Dundee Hills, might flower and ripen 12 days later than our Sister's Vineyard down at the bottom, and it's nice to have that span because I can control my picking decisions based on the vintage. If it's a cool vintage and I need more richness, I'll let this lower elevation hang longer and bring that richness in. If it's a warm vintage, as we're having so many of these days, it's really nice to have these high elevation vines. Pick those little earlier, bring a little acidity, a little sprightliness into the mix. And that's how I can get away with making wine without adding acid is because I have these vineyards, a whole spectrum of vineyards to play with, and it's super helpful.
So we're entering veraison right now. It's the stage where the grapes kind of announce who they are, what they are.
You can see, this is pinot noir and it's moving towards its colored phase. This is a really exciting time of year. One of the things that happens this time of year is that you can weigh these clusters and they're about half the weight they'll be when they reach their final ripeness. This year we have a lot more clusters than we did last year, thank God, but what you'll see is that the berries are quite small, so we're going to get a lot of intensity this year. Even once this cluster is fully expanded, it's probably only going to weigh about 80 or to 100 grams, which is almost ideal for the kinds of wine that we want to make from this block.
"Yeah, so this is a great time of year to be looking at the vineyards. You can see that there's a lot of variation in these vines in which vines are starting to color up. Look here, this vine is starting to get some nice purple berries, but if we jump a vine down here, this one is a little bit less ripe and that's just genetic variation. That's actually something that we're looking for in the vineyards, because you don't want everything to be perfectly consistent and cookie cutter.
Complexity comes from variation, complexity comes from diversity, and so that's what you see here in these vines.
Oh, look over here, this vine here is an older vine probably due to be re-trunked, or maybe it's stressed out because the voles have been nibbling on its bark, definitely appears to be the case. So this one here is coloring up faster than its neighbors because it thinks it doesn't have long to live, and if we don't step in and do something for this vine, it won't. So we'll be working on that this winter during pruning time.
Austin Beeman:
What would you step in and do for it?
Jason Lett:
Well, these are un-rooted vines. Because the vines are un-rooted, you don't have to sort of worry about the root stalk overtaking the scion, and so you can actually grow a shoot from the base of the plant, train it up, and create a new trunk. I'm just trying to see if there's one close by where we've done that. I see one three rows over. So if you look here, okay? This is a shoot that we just started training up last year and you can see it's growing out from down here. It's tapped into those old roots.
This vine is planted '68, so it 53 years old now. This young vine is on 53 year old roots, and eventually we'll be able to trim this trunk away and have this brand new trunk in its place. It's a way to kind of revitalize the vine in situ. It's not something you can do with grafted vines. This is something you can only do with un-rooted vines, but un-rooted vines have their problems, and I'll go show you what those are.
So we're standing here at the Eyrie Vineyard. These are the first vines planted in the Willamette Valley back in 1965. These vines behind me here are in fact, those first vines. However, they did not start here in this spot, they started at a nursery site that my father established south of us here about an hour within the Willamette Valley, but my father was starting with cuttings, sections of stick this long, and they needed a place that was irrigated, that had rich soils, basically the exact opposite of what you want in an established vineyard. And so he found a spot in a grass seed field south of here, planted the vines, let them grow out for a year, and then brought them here with the help of his new vineyard assistant, my mother, in 1966, and planted them in this present spot. So the vines are from '65, they've been growing here since '66.
What is an eyrie?
My father's newly recruited vineyard help, my mom, named the vineyard, and she was an English major so she knows fancy words like eyrie, and eyrie is a hawk's nest. And as my folks were planting the vines in this big tree behind me here, there was a pair of hawks that were nesting and sort of building their nest and having their babies, and my parents were planting their vines and getting ready to have their babies. And they just felt a real kinship and connection with the hawks that were here, and so it's named the Eyrie Vineyards after the hawks that lived here. And the hawks still live here today. I just picked up this feather down the road there, and this is a feather from a red tailed hawk. And every Eyrie label that you see is probably going to have a hawk on it, or some sort of abstract watercolor, if not. But we're always trying to refer back to the ecology of the place, and that's really what the name symbolized and always has symbolized.
I know a bottle of bleach doesn't seem like it has very much to do with organic viticulture, and you're probably right, but this has a purpose and we're just trying to slow the spread of phylloxera in the vineyards.
Unless you're a European in the 19th century, you probably don't know what phylloxera is. Phylloxera is ... It's an aphid basically that feeds on the roots of European grapevines, and it's defeated by planting vines on root stalks, which is something that my father didn't want to do. So all of these vines are un-rooted and we talked about re-trunking, so un-rootedness has a lot of advantages. The vines have better access to water, you can re-trunk them, training, pruning, disease resistance. There's lots of reasons that you want to have un-rooted vines. Phylloxera is one of the reasons you don't, so I'm just going to wash my feet here and then we'll go into a phylloxerated block.
Let's talk about phylloxera. When I have winemakers and visitors from Europe, they always love this part of the vineyard because they haven't seen phylloxera in 120 years. I wish I could say the same. This poor vine that has just a little bit of green here is still struggling along trying to survive, and you can see behind me here that we've already started the process of taking out vines. I've grown up working with these vines. I'm almost as old as they are, and so this makes me very sad to see this. You can see this vine here has completely given up. This one is still struggling along, trying to give us something.
There's really nothing you can do about phylloxera. The only thing you can do is to replant on root stalk, and it's very sad.
We are however, trying to extend the life of these vines for as long as we can, and one of the ways that we do that is we don't plow. So if you look between these rows, you'll see our native grass cover. It's brown and dry looking right now. It's not dead, it's just dormant, and as soon as we get a rain, that stuff will wake back up again. But something else you'll see is between the rows here, we're also leaving the grass, and in the spring when everything is up and blooming, you'll see 15 to 20 different species around each vine. There's a lot of genetic diversity tucked around down here living underground, and it's all dormant right now because really, the only thing that can survive in this summer heat is a grape vine.
A lot of people ask me about sort of what the future looks like at Eyrie, and obviously, when I came on here, it was right at the time when phylloxera was settling in. Our winery, we'd been working in it at that point for 45 years, and my dad had amassed quite a collection of library wines. And so I view my challenges as we go forward as sort of releasing those library wines to the public and making sure that they taste the way they're supposed to. Someday I've got to rebuild that winery, still haven't done that yet. And especially important is to maintain the estate by replanting vines as they pass away. And because of the phylloxera problem, that's an accelerated need.
You can see this field behind me here is open, and so I'm following a traditional practice of fallowing here. These were pulled out three years ago, I'm going on the old Burgundian principle that you fallow for seven years before you replant, and that's largely because there are fungal organisms in the ground breaking down the roots of those dead vines, and you want that process of decomposition to have fully completed before you plant again. At the same time, because we're leaving this field here, we're adding carbon to the soil, the soil is sort of recalibrating and getting ready for that next plantation.
It's very important, and one of our practices is that we don't fertilize, we don't irrigate, we don't plow. There's a lot of things we don't do, and a lot of people say, "Well, if you're not doing anything, how are you wine making?"
And comes out of the fact that like not doing something is actually harder than doing something, this case in point. If we were following standard practice and getting in there with a plow and plowing that down and immediately replanting and throwing in an irrigation system, we would be up and running and profitable in three years with vines. But instead we're taking this very long, slow, kind of natural, traditional approach to planting vines with the hopes that the quality of the wine down the road is going to justify that.
So this is where I grew up. These vines are just a couple years older than I am, and I definitely grew up working here. I followed my dad around from the time I was three until the time I was 13, and like every kid probably, when I turned 13, everything my dad did suddenly became lame.
And so I continued to work here for pocket money. I can definitely remember coming through these vines and tending them as a teenager, listening to my Walkman, high tech stuff. But that was just to make pocket money. I paid for a ticket to France to go be a stagiaire with the [inaudible 00:18:45] family in 1987, by working in these vines. And that was a great experience, but unfortunately, probably lost on a 17 year old.
At that time I didn't think I wanted anything to do with the wine business, and I was just using it as my entree into a beautiful place. And it was a beautiful place, still is. But I do think I was able to absorb enough there that the wine business always kind of stuck in the back of my mind, and even though I moved away and I lived in places like Connecticut and New Mexico for 10 years and stayed away from the family domain, these vines brought me back. They're siblings and not really knowing how they were going to be taken care of in the generations to come, I realized it was just time for me to step up.
And at the same time, I'd gotten a degree in plant ecology and kind of realized that if you want to understand how plants interact with their environment, wine is a great way to do it. I mean, wine just distills that experience the plant has had for a hundred days in this place, on these soils, with these conditions, in this climate. It's just pulling all these factors together into a glass, and it's just amazing. So when you drink a glass of wine, you're getting an incredible amount of information delivered straight to the deepest parts of your brain, and that to me was just something that was too attractive to pass up.
So I came back here in 1997, worked to harvest in one of the most difficult vintages of the 90s and loved it, and asked my dad if I could come back and work in wine. And both of my folks were surprised because they had thought that that was kind of the last thing on my mind, but we worked together on and off for five or six years, I went off and started my own wine label called Black Cap. And then in 2005, my father's health really took a turn for the worst, and so he invited me back to be the winemaker and really just very gracefully executed that move.
He just said, "Jason, from this point on all decisions in the vineyard and winery are yours, I just ask that you ask my advice from time to time." So that's how we worked it out, and so we were able to work together on that basis until 2008, he passed away, and I've been running the business with the help of my co-owner, my mother, ever since, and I'm very grateful to do it.
FTC Compliance: I currently work for Cutting Edge Selections which represents The Eyrie Vineyards in Ohio and Kentucky, but this blog and podcast are completely separate from that business relationship.
THIS IS EPISODE #82 OF UNDERSTANDING WINE WITH AUSTIN BEEMAN
FOLLOW THE WINE ADVENTURE
EQUIPMENT I USE