Oregon: In the valley of wine

MCMINNVILLE, ORE. — Blame the volcanoes of the Northwest that sent so much lava roaring through this valley about 16 million years ago and set the stage. Or blame the glaciers of Montana for forcing floods, about 14,000 years ago, that carried in so many tons of rich dirt.

Or you could just blame David Lett. He was the 25-year-old who rolled in from California 43 years ago with a trailer full of vine cuttings and a crazy dream about something called Pinot. And now the Willamette Valley is never going to be the same.

After spending most of the 20th century as a haven for hazelnut growers and turkey farmers, this territory, about an hour's drive south of Portland, now belongs to the Pinot grape and those who admire it.

Stand on high ground in the Dundee Hills and you see the trained vines march across the landscape, row by row, like a green invading army or the cast of China's Olympic ceremony. About 275 wineries do business here, joined by burgeoning numbers of tasting rooms, restaurants and lodgings.

The nuts and birds are still around -- in fact, Oregon still produces most of this country's hazelnuts, also known as filberts. But ever since Lett and fellow Pinot pioneers, including Dick Erath, Bill Blosser and Susan Sokol Blosser, started winemaking here in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the way of the grape has been ascendant.

For anybody accustomed to California tasting rooms, this is a different sort of wine country -- cooler than the vineyards of Napa or Sonoma or Santa Ynez or San Luis Obispo County; more suited to small-volume operations; and without a single big, fancy hotel.

Here for three weekdays in September, I paid $55 a night for a tiny hotel room (bathroom down the hall) and $20 a day for a rental car (Thrifty, at the Portland airport). I dined without reservations at several well-regarded restaurants. I drank a lot. And one morning, I spent two hours on the back of a Tennessee walking horse, gliding down those vineyard rows and ducking under filbert branches with guide Jake Price. Twice we stopped, tied up the horses and sauntered into a tasting room for a nip.

Up-and-comer

The Willamette Valley is about 100 miles long, with six sub-appellations, each offering its own microclimate. It is not quite nirvana -- not with such cold, wet winters and not with such congestion on the area's main artery, Oregon Highway 99W, around the town of Dundee.