Sokol Blosser Winery - Oregon
The WinoTripper Goes To Dundee, Oregon
I flew out of SFO to PDX (Portland, OR) for a quick visit with my good friends for the annual Sagitarium Bday weekend. You see, there are about a half dozen of us with Birthdays in December, and in the old days, when we all lived together in San Francisco, we'd have a big joint Bday bash. I hoped, but didn't really plan, to visit a winery or two while I was up there. Luckily, my hosts were way ahead of me and had a plan. But I knew it was gonna be a good trip from the very start when I saw that the gate I was leaving from at SFO had the John Madden Bay Area Sports Hall Of Fame plaque. Nice. Can't go wrong with John Madden.
I admit that I haven't done the Oregon wine trail and don't know much about the wineries. But at a wine class at the SF Wine Center I had tasted, and loved, an Oregon Pinot Noir made by Sokol Blosser. Seemed like a logical place to start since the Sokol winery and tasting room is only about thirty minutes or so outside of Portland in town called Dundee.
It was a rainy day in the Pacific Northwest (surprise!) and the traffic was a bit slow at times, but we descended upon Dundee in no time. A foggy mist floated along to tops of the rolling vineyards on either side of the driveway as we rolled up to the tasting room. I was with my hosts, The Longstockings, who don't do a lot of wine tasting, so they were looking to me to get the score.
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How very interesting that you would choose Dundee and Sokol Blosser for your first Oregon wine experience. IIRC, Dundee was the birthplace of Oregon's now-vaunted, Pinot Noir-heavy wine industry. A Sokol made some news last year when it was featured on one of those chef-competition reality shows.
From what little I do know, Maison Joseph Drouhin established their Domaine Drouhin outpost here specifically for its similarity to their Burgundy lands...well, that and a heart-poundingly narrow victory over a Pinot Noir from one of Oregon's wine pioneers back around 1980. (Frenchie got his knickers in a twist and figured, if you can only barely beat 'em, better join 'em! ;-) That event may have single-handedly given Oregon its Pinot Noir cred, or at very least, jump-started the wine industry here.