Take a walk on Lenné Estate with the Proprietor Steve Lutz. This small estate in the Yamhill Carlton AVA of Willamette Valley, Oregon has - To hear Steve Lutz tell it - the poorest soil imaginable. “The worst in the county,” he boasts with pride and bravado. That’s because the depleted ancient sedimentary soil, outside of Yamhill, OR. he believes, is the best in which to grow Pinot Noir grapes.

Check out the six-minute video or read a transcript below.

This is Episode #70 of Understanding Wine with Austin Beeman.

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Special Thanks to Carl Giavanti https://carlgiavanticonsulting.com

Transcript:

Steve Lutz:

In fact, I burned out a clutch on this hillside. I burned the clutch of the tractor out trying to stop and start and hand water with a pull tank. It was really difficult to keep them alive. We don't have irrigation here and in the beginning, we just didn't have a water source. So we dry farmed all this and of all the blocks, this was definitely the most difficult.

I'm Steve Lutz, owner of Lenné Estate in the heart of the Yamhill Carlton-Appellation in the northern Willamette Valley. We have 21 acres here. Small, south-facing slope which is really what you want in this part of Oregon.

We're sitting at an elevation of about 424 feet here and we go up to an elevation of about 585 feet. In Oregon, there's basically three parameters for great vineyards and that's elevation, orientation, and aspect.

This particular area, the Yamhill-Carlton Appellation, is all sedimentary soil. It was old ocean floor that got pushed up when the plates collided about 16 million years ago and so it's basically sandstone and silt stone.

So we're kind of in the cross hairs of the vineyard here in the middle where we have blocks going out each way and interestingly enough, the whole soil type here is a soil type called Peavine which is a very poor sedimentary soil. It's actually considered one of the worst sedimentary soils in the county by the county. Really one of the worst agricultural soils, but that's what we want for growing grapes.

We want soils that control the vines' vigor, that make the vine struggle a little bit more to produce canopy, and give us smaller, thicker-skinned berries.

So if you were to come and look at these mountain vineyards with these very poor soil types, you would see that the berries are much smaller than vineyards closer to the valley floor where they have a lot more nutrients.

So really, the best wines in the world come from the poorest soils and that's why you'll see in this part of the northern Willamette Valley, you'll see that most of the great vineyard sites are on these steeper, south-facing slopes.

So the vineyard is broken up into blocks and these first six rows here are a specific clone called 114 and then we transition into our 115 block. This is Pommard on the other side and then up top we have more Pommard and we have two other clones split up in a block we call Kill Hill up above which we'll take a closer look at.

So everything we do here is kind of modeled after Burgundy. It's called single guyot and vertical trellising. We train all these canes up this trellis, exposing the leaves to sunlight and the fruiting zone is really interesting here. Because we're getting warmer here, we're starting to move the fruiting wire a little bit up off the ground.

If you go to Burgundy, you'll see that the fruiting wires are way down because they want to get that radiant heat from the ground and we used to do that as well.

We used to keep them much closer, but over the last few years we're responding to some of these warmer vinages and we're gradually moving the fruiting wire a little bit higher because we don't need all this heat because we've got plenty of heat the last few years and we really are not sure where that's going to go.

We can always adjust them back down if we start having much cooler vinages, but I think obviously the warmth is here to stay for a while and so we're responding to it in some of our farming practices.

This was old ocean floor and it's really compressed silt stone and sandstone. If you dug down into this, you would get these orange-ish, yellow-ish chunks of compressed silt stone and you can see there's just not a lot of organic matter in this particular soil.

These vines are going to have to work a little bit harder and they'll produce more intense fruit than if we grew them in a nutrient-rich soil base.

We chose different clones for diversity. We had a pretty good idea of what clones would work in this soil type when we started and because this is a fairly homogenous site although there are certainly differences in this site even in this little 21 acres, because we are fairly homogenous though, we wanted to add diversity through clonal diversity because each clone has its own personality.

We do have five different clones here at Lenné and I love to blend those clones together. Sometimes they enhance each other, but we also like to feature single clones here as well. So we have four single clone wines we make here which is really interesting because you get to see the personality of each clone. Some are more black fruited, some are more red fruited, and even though the year changes every year, the personality of the clone always stays the same.

So out of this small 21 acre site, we're making now eight different Pinot Noirs and also Chardonnay and a rosé in some years. 

www.lenneestate.com