Although the entire video Walking the Original Vines of The Eyrie Vineyards was over twenty minutes, there was a lot of great content with winemaker Jason Lett than ended up on the ‘cutting room floor.’ I’ve been releasing those as ‘tasting pour’- sized samples on Instagram Reels and TikTok. I never thought, I’d do it, but vertical video!

Transcripts::

• Accidental Melon de Bourgogne

  • We wound up with Melon by mistake. When my father came here, he brought seven different varieties. He brought Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and then very small amounts of five other varieties. Riesling and Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Meunier, what he thought was Pinot Blanc. And that turned out to be this Melon de Bourgogne.

    You can see the Melon looks a lot like Chardonnay, it's got this Chardonnay like leaf with the open petiole down here at the bottom. If you're walking in a vineyard and you see that and you're anywhere but the Loire, you know that's Chardonnay.

    And so when my dad saw this, he realized, "Oh, jokes on me. The nursery sent me Pinot Blanc, but this is definitely not Pinot Blanc because this is not a Pinot leaf." And so he always thought this was a Chardonnay and it wasn't until the mid nineties, when we learned that this was Melon de Bourgogne.

• Trousseau

  • It's nice and soft, I can actually eat this right now. Planting a new variety is always a learning curve because you just don't know how it's going to respond to your climate. And one of the things that I find is that you really don't know what ripeness is until you work with a variety for a while. One of the things that fooled me about Trousseau, the first vintage 2014, was not really understanding that many of the berries in a ripe cluster are going to be this color.

    This could actually count as a ripe berry in Trousseau and that's one of the reasons why the color is so light. In spite of its lightness, Trousseau has a lot of tannin. It gives it a lot of presence. But also because the berries are so light, it gives you sort of like the fruitiness and lift of a white wine. I just find this to be so fun to drink because you've got the tannin and the density of a red wine and the lightness and the fruit of a white wine colliding together in one bottle. It's really a fascinating thing to work with.

• Pinot Meunier: The Back Up Plan

  • See how white and fuzzy that is? So meunier is the French word for miller, somebody who grinds flour. And these leaves have just a light fuzz on them. And so in the spring, these leaves are all pink and they're covered with white fuzz, just the cutest thing, and so soft and furry and so fun to touch.

    We've been growing Pinot Meunier since 1965. I think my father planted it because he was worried that if it wasn't going to be warm enough here to ripen Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, that we would have a fallback plan and we could make sparkling wine.

    Pinot Meunier is one of the three grapes of champagne. It's actually the most widely planted variety in champagne. But the Champenois don't talk about it. It's a dirty secret. It doesn't have the reputation of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay because Burgundy have really kind of made those two varieties famous. Definitely not a tannic variety. Great acidity, wonderful fruit, and just so cute. Look right here.

• Organic Viticulture

  • Eyrie's always been organic. Even before there was such a thing as organic certification, my dad was farming with vines without herbicides, without pesticides, without systemic chemicals, without irrigation, and without tillage in the established vines. So he was really groundbreaking in the way that he didn't break the ground.

    So the cocktail of what was being sprayed behind me here is a mixture of powdered milk, elemental sulfur. You can smell a little cinnamon in the air right now because we're spraying a little bit of cinnamon oil to suppress any powdery mildew that might be taking hold right before veraison on here.

    And then finally, there's a little bit of kelp powder and the kelp acts as a micronutrient that feeds the vines through the leaves. So it's just a little boost, a little refreshing zap of energy before they go into the hard work of getting the grapes to their final stage of ripeness.

• Mowing Between the Vines

  • So this vineyard looks more unkept than the vineyards we were in before and you're not wrong. We're getting ready to do the last mow of the year here. We have a couple of Italian mowers that we attach to the tractors that mow both between the rows here and also under the vines. They've got these auxiliary mowers that swing off the sides here with a sensor finger.

    When the finger touches a grapevine, the mowers retract and so we're able to weave amongst the grapevines. In a week, this place is going to look quite a bit more manicured but right now, it's got this kind of wild vibe going on because we're still really in the middle of sort of tidying everything up.

• Chasselas in the Willamette Valley

  • We're standing here at another one of our experimental plantings. This is Chasselas. So Chasselas is like the terroir grape of Switzerland, very light, very floral. This is one of the larger plantations of Chasselas in the Willamette Valley.

    As you can see, we train these differently. They don't run along this wire and then grow up upwards. We actually have them draped across the top and hanging down. That's because it is just untrainable. It's so wild and wants to go so many different directions that we finally just stopped battling it, and we just let it cascade like this, and it's worked out well.

    As the clusters receive sunlight, these big, long clusters, loose clusters, they start to bronze. And so the outside actually starts to pick up a golden hue, and that's where it gets its name, Chasselas Dore, dore meaning golden. And so these are well on their way to being ripe. Mm.