478: Jason Lett Is Not At Peace

[00:00:01] Intro Most people know Becky Wasserman as an exporter of Domain bottled burgundy, but a key moment of the Jason Lett interview that you'll hear later on revolves around an earlier period of Becky's life when she sold wine barrels to American wineries. And to understand how

[00:00:33] Becky found herself selling French cooperage in the United States and how that was also the beginning of her wine export business, let me play for you a clip from episode 430 of Ill Drink to That, which is an interview with Becky Wasserman.

[00:00:48] And I ended up having a California connection because I was a barrel peddler. You ended up working for Francois Frerin and Terence O. Yes, correct. And you see, I'd gone to California. Actually, my sons and I were sent away in

[00:01:03] the summer of 1975 because there was a resident mistress from New Zealand. So we were told to go. And we'd met people in California or come to visit for one reason or another.

[00:01:16] And so I went off to California with my two sons. It was an adventure. And I ended up in Montana. That was the last stop. And feeling, you know, sort of quite out of sorts. But

[00:01:30] I was offered a job in Yellowstone Park cooking because the friend of mine who took us in in Montana said, Becky's a very good cook. And I suddenly realized, good heavens, I can do something. And perhaps we ought to stay in Yellowstone. You know, have the boys go

[00:01:48] to school there and so on and so forth. But I can actually do something and get paid for it. Got back here, and Jean-Francois said, well, you've been to California? And I said

[00:02:00] yes. And he said, well, I wonder if you could sell a few barrels for me. So you know the proverbial eureka. This is something that could happen. And that was really the beginning

[00:02:14] of it all. In my generation, you see, one forgets that there were a number of professions that were not open to us. And many of us were condemned, you know, to think of life in terms

[00:02:26] of being a high-powered secretary and all of that. So it wasn't—earning money wasn't a prime motivation. It was doing something that wasn't just sort of so standard, if you will. And so, no, the whole idea was, gosh, if I could be a cook at Yellowstone,

[00:02:48] I can probably sell barrels, never having sold anything in my life. And so the year later, Jean-Francois made me a small barrel, and off I went to California with a barrel in my car.

[00:03:01] You just sort of showed it to wineries and said, are you interested in French cooperage? The person who was very nice to me was a man named Richard Graff, and he was one of

[00:03:11] the pioneer winemakers in California. And he was very kind. He tried to bring in barrels before. He introduced me to a few people, and I met wonderful, extraordinary men like Andrei Chelychev, who again was very interested but told me, if you ever let me down, I will

[00:03:33] pursue you to the ends of the earth. And that was quite interesting. And then Peter and Paul, there was a magazine called Wines and Vines, which listed all the California wineries. So Peter and Paul, in their very childish handwriting, we wrote

[00:03:48] letters to everybody, introducing the cooperage and so on and so forth. And some people actually responded. And those are the people I went to visit. There was no show-off period at that point. The winemakers were very devoted, but no one

[00:04:07] was showing off. There was no media at that point. But you know, the different types of oak all gave different sorts of degrees of oak, so the troncet being the finest, really the limousin, always with a tiny little smell of vanilla. You know, it was very interesting,

[00:04:31] but it was the beginning of something. How often were you in California at that point? I would go to California twice a year to sell barrels. And eventually you transitioned to Taranso. Worked with them both. Jean Taranso was a gentleman and a scholar, had a barrel museum. It's

[00:04:48] very interesting to sit in the adulteress's barrel, because fellows would actually have one made, lock Madame up when they went off. What I also liked and went with both Jean Taranso and Jean Francois was into the forest to see how oaks grow, and that the best oaks

[00:05:09] are very often not crowded by other ones. And the wood choppers back then were fairly small. It wasn't done in an industrial way back then, and they would chop down a very magnificent oak, and then they would put very heavy pieces of metal down the length

[00:05:29] of the trunk, and they'd go boom, the trunk would open up. And the smell and the color were just exquisite. They're just exquisite. You know, they talk about oak being noble and so on and so forth, but when the oak tree was split, it was an incredible experience.

[00:05:47] So you made a sale to Maya Camas at one point, right? I did. That was the first. They bought the first 15 barrels. I came back, and when I told Jean Francois's father, I've sold 15 barrels, and he looked at me and said,

[00:05:57] that's not going to keep us going. But the interesting thing about it was you had to get a California estate to receive the container of barrels. And it was like putting, what do you call it, Sudoku today? One of those sort of mathematical games. Somebody would take 12

[00:06:16] barrels, somebody would take 15, somebody would take… So you had to mathematically get your container loaded. They were called high tops at that point. And then you had to say to Spring Mountain or somebody, you know, would you agree to receive the container? And then people

[00:06:34] would come with their trucks to pick up their barrels. So it wasn't just, you know, I have a barrel for you, you know. It was much more complex. But what it taught me was how to group wines.

[00:06:45] Because when you work with small producers, you don't have a container full. You've got 10 of this, 23 of that, and so on and so forth. And so I was really a… I wasn't a groupie, I was a grouper. And that was my great talent, was grouping.

[00:07:00] Because much later when you wanted to sell grower burgundy instead of negotiate burgundy, which had been sort of what was selling before, you had to come up with the methods and instructions to do that.

[00:07:10] Of course. But even more than just containers, because you had to learn things about trucking. And a French trucker is not obligated to load his truck. So that if you arrive as a trucker

[00:07:25] and you just see a four-year-old child going, bonjour monsieur, you drive on. Because you have a very tight schedule. Everything has to go into a container at a certain point to get on the ocean

[00:07:36] to go. So I had to really work… but I like that sort of thing. I like why or how can it go from point A to point B. When did you decide that you wanted to do some brokering of burgundy yourself?

[00:07:50] The content of a barrel in the end was more enticing than a barrel itself. And it seemed to me that it might be just a very good thing to do. Certainly, Jean-Francois introduced me to a

[00:08:06] number of domains where he sold barrels. And I had the great good fortune of meeting people like Michel Lafarge and Gerard Potel. And one thing sort of led to another. I'll drink to that, where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. I'm Levi Dalton.

[00:08:27] I'm Erin Scala. And here's our show today. Jason Lett, the co-owner of Irie Vineyards in Oregon. Hello sir, how are you? I'm great, Levi. It's nice to see you. So you were born in 1969? Yeah, I was born right before the first vintage here in the Willamette Valley.

[00:08:58] Your dad had planted Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley in the mid-60s. Yeah, he came up here looking for a place to plant Pinot Noir. And he looked all over the world,

[00:09:10] actually. Not just at the United States. He looked at the South Island of New Zealand. And he looked at northern Portugal, kind of up in the Mino region where the Atlantic cools things down.

[00:09:22] And he was just looking for a climate analogous to Burgundy's. And when he looked around the world, the one place that seemed to check all those boxes over and over again was the Willamette Valley. Because he was specifically interested in Pinot Noir?

[00:09:37] He was absolutely in love with Pinot Noir. But Pinot Noir is a very fickle and focused grape. It demands a very small range of climates in which it can ripen at its best. And when you start

[00:09:53] tearing the world apart and looking for those places, there are very few. He was specifically interested in an idea of marginality? My father realized that Cabernet grown in Bordeaux, those vintages can be iffy. Those grapes are ripening right on the margin of when winter comes.

[00:10:13] Looking at Pinot Noir and Burgundy, again, it's the same story. The grapes are ripening right at the edge of winter. If you think about how fruit ripens, there are these volatile esters that are

[00:10:28] meant to attract birds and humans and anything else who would happen to come by and eat it and help it reproduce. And there are sugars that are also part of that mix to make the fruit attractive. And those sugars and those esters develop on separate curves.

[00:10:47] I mean, obviously you could take Pinot Noir and grow it in Bordeaux and have it ripen easily. But people don't do that. You could ripen Cabernet much more easily in the Southern Rhone

[00:11:00] than it ripens in Bordeaux. But people don't do that either. Because in France, over many hundreds of years, people understand that the varieties that evolve in a place belong in a place. And

[00:11:13] that those varieties are evolving to the margins in order to attain that absolute peak of flavor. And so he was looking for a region like that for Pinot Noir outside of Burgundy.

[00:11:25] He was a student at UC Davis at the time and he started to hit the books looking for a place that was going to fit a grape variety and a wine he wanted to make.

[00:11:35] I think Davis in the early 1960s must have felt like a really revolutionary place. Dad was one of six students in the viticulture program. There was no winemaking program. So he was one of six students in the viticulture program.

[00:11:52] That's undergrads and PhDs all put together. And Amerina Winkler in 1962 have just published General Viticulture. And this is a book that's still influential. It's still the gold standard today. But a lot of what informs that book is research that they did back into French

[00:12:12] writings in the early 1900s, late 1880s, looking at climate and variety. And Victor Pouillot, 1888, is assigning five different ripening periods from one to five. Earliest ripening varieties being period one and the latest ripening varieties being period five. And all grapes basically fall within those five categories.

[00:12:40] So the professors at Davis are kind of rediscovering this old knowledge and bringing it forward to the students and getting them cranked up about this. If you think about my father's generation of students, Charles Goury, who was a fellow student

[00:12:53] of his, came up here. There was a wave of kids, young men from this time of education that kind of came out of this school of thought, charged up about finding the places where the varieties

[00:13:11] that they loved would ripen the best. And so your dad had been born in 1939. So he was in his 20s and 30s around this time. He moved to Oregon when he was 25 years old. By that time, he already had a degree in philosophy, an additional degree in viticulture.

[00:13:27] He'd served in the Coast Guard and had traveled for nine months in Europe, kind of bumming around in the back of a station wagon, going from place to place, region to region, talking to growers, trying to understand what it was that made varieties express themselves the best.

[00:13:44] And that's really where those theories about marginality or ripening on the margins were brought home to him. He had met Lee Stewart at Chateau Souverain, right? Yeah. That was called Souverain Cellars back in those days. Lee was a very interesting character.

[00:14:03] Dad was on his way to an interview at a dental school and happened to sort of drive through Sonoma a day too early and happened to be driving past a really modest little building

[00:14:16] and saw a man, this is January, it's cold, standing in front of the building in rain gear washing barrels. And I don't know if my father had ever even seen a barrel before, but it looked cool.

[00:14:27] So he pulled over and just started talking to the guy. And it turned out that he was an English student who was working for this guy named Lee Stewart. Dad was intrigued why anybody would come

[00:14:37] all the way from England to work for a man working in a shed in California. And Gary, the Englishman, made the introduction to Lee. My father and Lee hit it off. Dad went to his dental school interview,

[00:14:52] came back home to Salt Lake City, and sitting on the table was a job offer from Lee Stewart. So that's where dad kind of came out of the closet to his parents about this newfound passion

[00:15:06] to make wine instead of going to dental school. That was a very idiosyncratic choice in 1963. My mom has a great analogy for this. She says, saying you wanted to become a winemaker in 1963

[00:15:19] was like saying you wanted to become a shepherd. It's not a career path that any parent would wish for their kid. What were their attitudes towards alcohol, his parents? So his parents came of age

[00:15:31] in Chicago in the 1920s and 30s. So you can imagine what their attitude was towards alcohol. And you can also imagine the disappointment of my father's grandfather when his mother and her four sisters all formed a jazz band together in Chicago in the 1920s and 30s.

[00:15:50] So they were kind of wild women. They continued to be wild women through their lives. Really fun, you know, world travelers, like super strong, interesting, idiosyncratic girls who grew into women of the same ilk. So dad was definitely informed by that kind of baked-in

[00:16:08] resistance to anybody telling them what to do and setting their own damn course. Yeah, I mean that seems like a part of the guiding principle, right? Oh, absolutely. He grew up in Salt Lake City, one of the few non-Mormons in a culture that at that

[00:16:21] time was very largely Mormon. And you know, I think it gave him a healthy disrespect for authority for its own sake. Which is good if you need to make realizations that other people around you are not making.

[00:16:34] Which is what he, you know, was continually pushing himself to do. So he actually ended up working with Lee Stewart for a while, right? He worked with Lee Stewart for a while, but the compromise that he worked out with his

[00:16:45] parents actually was that he would go to school and get a real degree. And there were only two schools at the time that offered a degree in anything related to winemaking. One was in New York and one was in California.

[00:16:57] What was going on in California was this incredible sort of Renaissance moment of this rediscovery of these texts from France in the 1880s. And that's what drove my father's philosophy. Somehow he had access to the Pouillot book, Thousand Varieties of Vines.

[00:17:17] And he sat down and he copied the whole thing out by hand. And it's fascinating to go back and look through those notebooks because you can see little tick marks where he marked varieties that he wanted to play with.

[00:17:28] And Pinot Noir, but also Pinot Meunier, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay. He was going through and he was deliberately looking for varieties that would work alongside Pinot Noir in a cool climate. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what has to happen after a break in the lineage-like

[00:17:45] prohibition where you have to kind of rediscover writings and traditions that have basically gone away. Yeah, I've never thought about it this way before, but it is kind of analogous to the Dark Ages and having to uncover the old texts and discover the classical period all over again.

[00:18:03] What was Lee Stewart like? Did your dad ever tell you what Lee was like as a person? Lee was sort of a bugaboo who was used to admonish me for not having tight enough attention to detail in the cellar.

[00:18:16] So if I set a bung down the wrong way, my father would admonish me and he would say, Jason, Lee Stewart would never do it that way. And I happened to run into Warren Winiarski at an event later and asked him about working with Lee.

[00:18:32] And Warren told me a great story which made all of my dad's admonishments fall into place. Warren told me that whenever you washed a piece of equipment in the cellar, that before

[00:18:46] you picked it up, you had to go over to the stack of tissue paper that was kept on a table, take off a sheet of tissue paper, and then pick up the implement with the tissue paper so that you didn't touch it with your fingers.

[00:18:57] So that degree of attention to detail is, I think, the thing that my dad took away the most from his experience with Lee Stewart. After dad met Lee and after he went to college and was sort of informed, you know, he used

[00:19:17] to talk about sort of agricultural hygiene, having to take classes, that entomology basically was here's the bug, here's how to kill it. And the same was true in the cellar. You know, the supremacy of stainless steel over oak barrels.

[00:19:31] A lot of this kind of super food processing approach to winemaking was being hammered home to the students there. And it wasn't until my dad traveled in Europe afterwards that he realized that there had

[00:19:41] to be a balance, that the cellar had to be an ecosystem, that the purpose of cleanliness was to encourage the things that you wanted to have grow and discourage the things that

[00:19:50] you didn't, but to make sure that you were keeping a balance in the cellar as well as the vineyard. A lot of times when I've read about your dad, the story goes that the UC Davis people thought

[00:20:01] he was stupid to go up to Oregon because he was going to get rained on. But speaking to you in the past, my understanding is actually that they encouraged him to go. I think it depends on the professor.

[00:20:12] I think, you know, Harold Berg was on the viticulture side and he was really pushing dad to come up to Oregon. Maynard Amarine was a little bit more of a stickler and couldn't see why anybody would want to take the chance and tried to discourage my father.

[00:20:26] So, you know, he got both discouraged and encouraged. What was the situation in Oregon for viticulture when he came up in the 60s? Historically here, there were grapes being grown in the 1800s. Prohibition probably wiped out that industry.

[00:20:41] There are some mentions of that, you know, some of the early texts. But really, Oregon's history kind of starts in 1961 and not in the Willamette Valley. It starts in the Umpqua with Richard Sommer at Hillcrest who planted the first sort of modern grapes in Oregon.

[00:20:59] So Sommer's approach was to just kind of shotgun a bunch of varieties into his vineyard and see what worked. My dad came along in 1965, having chosen the variety first. And so it was considered pretty outré for my dad to show up with Pinot Noir.

[00:21:17] I have to say that the reception of the farmers around us, though, was extremely warm. We were coming off this really cataclysmic storm that had happened in the early 60s called the Columbus Day Storm. And there was a really thriving industry of orchards here up until 1961.

[00:21:34] And then we had this tropical typhoon that came through, flattened the orchards. And so when my dad showed up in the mid-1960s, there were a lot of derelict, defunct orchards laying around and a lot of farmers.

[00:21:45] Scratching their heads about what the next move was going to be in the Willamette Valley. Hey, it's Levi. And I'll be breaking into this interview at a few times to provide some key context for you along the way.

[00:21:58] And at this point, Jason has just spoken about the Columbus Day Storms and how they damaged orchards in the Willamette Valley. And I want to play for you now a clip from episode 469 of this program, which was a conversation

[00:22:12] with Mimi Castile of Hopewell Wine, which is also in Oregon. We grow some amazing walnuts here. Yeah, that's what they said downstairs. They have like a shrine to walnuts down there. They should because they're all pretty much gone. The Columbus Day Storms kind of did those in.

[00:22:28] And guess what took their place? Vineyards. Oh, is that true? Yeah. So that was the first agricultural product that was grown on what was considered agriculturally poor soils. Walnuts. Right. And when the Columbus Day Storms happened in the 1960s, the walnut industry was really devastated by that.

[00:22:48] And so what then was considered to be otherwise agriculturally unsuitable for anything was up for development. And this was right around the Tom McCall days. And so that was the impetus for our land use laws coming to be because those agriculturally

[00:23:08] poor soils were slated for development, subdivisions, et cetera. And there was this major push because there were some vineyards already in Oregon and those shallow, rocky hillside soils were very suitable for viticulture.

[00:23:23] So that was really kind of a moment where we could have gone either way in Oregon in terms of our land use. And I think it led to some pretty good outcomes. You see what Mimi is saying here.

[00:23:36] She is stating that the early vineyards planted in Oregon in the 1960s played a big part in the development of the land use laws that protected what are still today agricultural land from being developed into urban sprawl.

[00:23:52] In other words, if David Lett hadn't come to the Willamette Valley when he did, the area that he made famous for Pinot Noir might be covered with houses today. The laws that today protect that same land for agricultural use came about partly as

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[00:25:38] And so here's this enthusiastic, hardworking, slightly ignorant young farmer shows up next door and our neighbors were actually really welcoming and helpful and showed us how to hook up equipment the right way and helped dad with a lot of the details, the nitty gritty literally of farming.

[00:25:57] So he brings up vine material in a horse trailer, right? So he started with 3,000 cuttings and you know, being a big part of it, but also there were, I think, let me count on my fingers here, six other varieties. He planted seven varieties to start with.

[00:26:12] So he was harking back to that work that he'd done out of Pouliot and looking at those varieties that he thought would ripen well alongside Pinot Noir. Chardonnay is an obvious choice, but he also brought this very obscure and unknown variety called Pinot Gris.

[00:26:30] There were four vines at a research vineyard in Davis and he got 160 cuttings off those four vines. So that's part of that count of 3,000 cuttings. Yeah, and those grapes came up in a horse trailer that he towed behind his car.

[00:26:44] You know, he came up in January of 65, which there had just been torrential floods and he was driving up I-5 and you know, the Willamette Valley was a lake on either side of I-5 and he just wondered what he'd gotten himself into. How did he pick Dundee?

[00:27:04] Like, what was it about that particular spot? That took some time to find the present vineyard. You know, he came to this with a lot of intentionality. He wasn't willing to settle for a site that someone else had chosen or just to sort of

[00:27:18] plop down somewhere and see what worked. He really wanted to look more closely at the valley itself and understand the texture of the valley, its microclimates, its soils before he made a choice for where to plant the vines. And he was starting with cuttings anyway.

[00:27:34] I mean, a cutting is just a stick, right? There's three or four buds on it. You jam the stick halfway in the ground, the buds that are underground are going to grow roots, the ones above ground are going to grow leaves.

[00:27:44] If you just keep those watered, you eventually get an established grapevine. So he sets the vines up in a nursery site. It's exactly what you don't want for a vineyard, but what you do want for a nursery, right?

[00:27:56] It's got nice rich soil on the valley floor and overhead irrigation. So he plants the vines six inches apart, allows them to grow roots, comes through, tends them, hoses them, waters them regularly. Tries to support himself at the same time with the job bundling blueberry cuttings for

[00:28:12] 15 cents an hour and starts driving around the valley and looking all over for the place to put these precious vines. His focus begins to center on the northwestern quadrant of the Willamette Valley.

[00:28:27] Once he's kind of made the choice climatically that that's where he wants to be, he starts looking at soils. He's guided to the Dundee Hills by an extension agent who says, you plan to irrigate? My dad says no. He says, you might look at the Dundee Hills.

[00:28:47] There's a clay in the Drury soil called kaolin that holds water well in the summer, but it doesn't seal up very well. It holds water well in the summer, but it doesn't seal over in the winter.

[00:28:59] And so the grapes have access to oxygen even during a rainy period, which is really important of course to plants. They need to breathe through their roots. But then in the summer, the soils don't completely dry out at depth and so the vines will still

[00:29:10] be able to access water. Looking back at old interviews with your dad, it seems like he was encountering a lot of vintage variation, tackling this idea that some vintages were tough. I think dad took a lot of delight in the vintages that were considered hard.

[00:29:29] Think about it, just because something is hard doesn't make it bad. And also conversely, just because something is easy doesn't make it good. I think we get those things confused when we talk about wine vintages.

[00:29:41] I know that he was pretty startled by his first vintage, the 1970 vintage, mainly because he was used to the kind of color in Pinot Noir that he saw in Burgundy and in California

[00:29:52] when he was playing with the very small amounts of Pinot Noir that were planted there at the time. He was surprised by the pale color, so surprised in fact that the first vintage of Pinot Noir

[00:30:02] that he labeled, he didn't label Pinot Noir, he labeled it as Oregon Spring Wine. And very soon he realized his mistake. As he watched this wine gain depth, gain aromatic complexity, gain a clear potential to age, he realized, oh, I did make the wine I wanted to make.

[00:30:22] It's just two shades lighter than I thought it was going to be. And that's kind of continued to define Pairie Pinot Noir for whatever reason, just that lightness, that delicacy. Would you equate that with the clone that he chose of Pinot Noir or some other reason?

[00:30:39] I would not equate that lightness with clone. When dad came, there was one clone available of Pinot Noir, which was clone one, what we call Badensville clone, because it came to us from Switzerland. By the way, it came to Switzerland from Burgundy.

[00:30:55] So when the mercenaries were fighting for King Francis II to suppress the Dukes of Burgundy, he sent in mercenaries, the Swiss Guard basically, the guys who wear the fluffy pants in front of the Vatican today.

[00:31:10] And those guys fell in love with Pinot Noir and brought cuttings back to the Zurich area, which for 200 years had the opportunity to evolve there in a cooler climate than Burgundy. And as a result, Badensville was actually a really good initial match for our climate.

[00:31:29] Badensville today can be made in a whole spectrum of colors. The whole question of clone kind of defeats the purpose of why we're here. Obviously, if clone were what it was that determined the flavor of wine, then you could

[00:31:44] grow that clone anywhere and it would taste the same way. So I feel like maybe the Chardonnay conversation... In Oregon, people always talk about clone, whereas what's important about Oregon Chardonnay is climate, and the same is true of Pinot Noir.

[00:32:01] So the clone story got a little bit more complex inadvertently because Dad had brought a variety that Davis had told him was Gamay, but turned out in fact to be a different clone of Pinot Noir.

[00:32:15] And then in 1974, Dick Erath and his nursery partner Charles Coury brought up Pomard clone. So Pomard is what we call clone 5. And so I just poo-pooed the whole idea of whether clone is important or not,

[00:32:31] but I do think we were extremely lucky to have Badensville and Pomard planted in those early vineyards together. Pomard has this lovely, round, rich mid-palate. Not a lot of aromatic intensity, whereas clone 1, the Badensville clone, brings a ton of

[00:32:47] aromatic intensity but a little bit more of a delicate body. And so if you blend those two together, you get a very complete statement of Pinot Noir from only two clones.

[00:32:55] And how lucky were we that the two clones that we had were ones that played so well together? Vines are a trellis to California sprawl, right? And then there had to be some learning curve for vertical shoot positioning.

[00:33:08] So when Dead came up, he was actually pushing against a lot of the things that he learned in California. So he took these entomology classes, you know, maybe I said it before, where he was learning here's the bug, here's how to kill it.

[00:33:20] And at the same time, he's reading Rachel Carson and realizing we're not killing bugs, we're killing our entire ecosystem here. So he came to Oregon with a lot of skepticism about what he'd been taught in California. First of all, about vine spacing.

[00:33:36] So when he was selecting his cuttings, he was pulling them out of vineyards that were planted at 12 by 12 spacing. So 12 feet between vines, 12 feet between rows. And his answer to that was to half that spacing. So our vines are planted at 10 feet by 6 feet.

[00:33:57] Dead's kind of other revolutionary approach was vertical shoot positioning. It was incredibly labor intensive in those days because we didn't have the vineyard device that we call catch wires, which all at one time you can pull a whole curtain of shoots upright, longitudinally down the row.

[00:34:16] What we had to do in those days was to go through and individually tie each cane to the wire to train it upright. And that would happen two or three times. And each vine has, I don't know, 15, 20, 25 canes. So think about the hand labor involved in that.

[00:34:31] And all of that was done by the two women and my father who worked together in the vineyard. And that provided a different aspect in terms of exposure to sun and uniformity of ripeness when you do VSP as opposed to California sprawl.

[00:34:47] Yet dad had learned about VSP from his travels again in Europe, but he'd also gone to Germany, Switzerland. So these are countries with climates much more analogous to the Willamette Valley than Napa is. Napa is a very dry place.

[00:35:05] So he knew the importance of doing this, but our understanding evolved over time. So I can remember we had a Swiss researcher come visit us in 1980 and their plan was after visiting us drive down to Disneyland.

[00:35:21] And he walked out of the vineyard and was horrified to see that we had leaves on the eastern face of the fruit zone. So the Bowler family, Ernst Bowler and his family, skipped their vacation to Disneyland

[00:35:34] and stayed and worked with us to pull leaves off the east side of a block of vines so that we could see the effect. And so that was 1980. And we've been pulling leaves from around the fruit zone ever since.

[00:35:47] A lot of dad's initial vineyard decisions were based on conversations actually with the Swiss. So the height at which our trellises grow is about 14 buds high. That again comes from Swiss research.

[00:36:01] So it's really amazing to me to travel around the world and to see Swiss ideas that were introduced to other growing regions via Oregon. Like wine is a conversation starter, but that conversation can go all the way around the world. Badensville is right outside of Zurich.

[00:36:22] It's a cooler, rainier area. If you visit there, you feel like you're standing in the Willamette Valley just with taller mountains. So he planted Pinot Noir, he planted Pinot Gris as you alluded to, Chardonnay. He planted some Riesling, some Mouscat, and then there was some Shessla.

[00:36:38] There was a vine of Shessla that had snuck into the Mouscat. And it's something that we kind of cruise past and think, that's an odd Mouscat because the clusters were huge and had this coppery tipped shoots.

[00:36:53] And our vineyard manager, Javier Garcia, who's been with us since 1984, loved that particular vine for its eating quality. So he took cuttings off of that and planted a row of that in the early 2000s. We started making wine out of it experimentally. Messed that up.

[00:37:11] I messed that up. That's on me. I messed that up until finally I just got frustrated and decided I was going to pick it so incredibly green. And I can absolutely remember the feeling of joy when I finally tasted that wine right after fermentation.

[00:37:25] I mean, the yeast hadn't even settled out yet. And it just absolutely hit that spot that I wanted to observe this electric, expressive wine at an alcohol level that's ridiculously low, like less than 9%. You pick it at like 16 bricks, right? 16, 17.

[00:37:44] The only true answer when you pin a winemaker down about something, I'm sure you know this Levy, is it depends. So yeah, that's the answer I'm going to give you. Sorry. You actually make a lot of the different varieties into wines.

[00:37:56] But I feel like your dad, he had them planted. But he focused in on Pinot Chardonnay and Pinot Gris, right? You know, apple doesn't fall very far from the tree when it comes to this idea of

[00:38:07] messing around with different varieties and trying to find how they express themselves the best in the valley. You know, dad is playing around and putting his major focus, yes, in terms of planted acreage, what he's dedicating the family resources to.

[00:38:21] But you know, he's also making a red Pinot Meunier. And then that Pinot Meunier is a red Pinot Marnier. And then that Pinot Meunier is treated basically the same as our Pinot Noir and has an incredible aging ability of its own.

[00:38:35] He's playing around with covert germina and riesling and not feeling like that's the best choice for the area. He has a variety, he's not quite sure what it is. The leaves look like Chardonnay. It turns out to be Melon de Bourgogne.

[00:38:50] That's something actually that I bottled separately for the first time. So it's kind of fun. There's these things sitting in the vineyard that we're just kind of waiting to be played with, Melon being one of them, Chasselas being another.

[00:39:02] I'm lucky enough to be the guy that gets to play with them. By 79, 80, there's a lot of acclaim and attention that starts to find its way to some of your dad's wines. By 79 and 80, yeah, the acclaim starts. But let's back up two years to 76, 77, 78. It's hard going.

[00:39:22] Dad doesn't have enough grapes to support the family. We're not making enough wine to support the family. At the same time, we don't have enough money to plant more grapes. Dad finally sort of like swallows his pride and buys grapes from one of the only places

[00:39:39] where you can buy grapes in the Pacific Northwest at that time, which is Washington State. So he buys some of the first production from Sagemoor Farm, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot. It kills my dad to make Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

[00:39:57] But these are the varieties that people are asking for in the late 70s. And it's an accommodation he's making for just the ability to continue financially for the vineyard. And so I think like that period in the late 70s must have been pretty dark times for dad.

[00:40:11] Plus he had two kids to worry about, to clothe and feed and... Yeah, yeah, for sure. Not to go off on a sidetrack here, but my older brother, who's 18 months older than me, is autistic.

[00:40:26] And so at the time in the early 70s, autistic people were just warehoused at the state mental hospital. They weren't allowed the opportunity for an education. They were discouraged from being mainstreamed. They were separated from their parents because there was a thought at the time that the parents

[00:40:42] were making the kids autistic. So while my parents are starting a vineyard, starting a winery, they had a nursery where they were selling cuttings to other pioneer growers. They're also pioneering this whole sort of education effort for my brother to keep him

[00:40:59] in the family and to keep him engaged with his intellect, give him the ability to speak, to interact socially. So my parents had a lot of challenges in those early days. Because it wasn't like your dad had all this money to play with.

[00:41:13] He was really doing this with not much capital. I have a great copy of his original business plan, which is extremely well-written, incredibly optimistic. He says that my goal is to make 10,000 cases of wine and I feel like it will be possible

[00:41:34] for us to sell these quite easily within a year. And then he lists the three places on the West Coast where it could be possible to sell fine wine made in Oregon. Obviously, that's not how things were going to work out.

[00:41:47] So I don't think dad ever let himself be discouraged by these kind of setbacks. You know, he just continued to keep his head down to be rewarded by the quality of what he was getting out of the vineyard to let that guide him forward.

[00:42:01] The result was finally some recognition in 1979 and 1980. But that was due to a revelation that he had as he was tasting barrels that were coming off of these young vines. So we have our particular block of grapes. It's a tiny block, it's only 10 rows.

[00:42:25] It is surrounded by other plantings of Pinot Noir. It is surrounded by other plantings of Pinot Noir. This is actually compared to the original vines from 1965. A little bit of a later planting, it's 1968. And dad designated that the South Block.

[00:42:42] So dad is tasting these barrels in the winery and just realizing there's something special about these 10 rows that sets them apart from the rows that are planted, you know, immediately adjacent to this. And for him, it's this Eureka moment.

[00:42:55] We're all used to the conversation about Burgundy where you see these hard lines between greatness and average just in the space of a few feet. And the same seemed to be happening at Irie. So dad designated that wine separately. He called it the South Block Reserve.

[00:43:16] And he had this kind of crazy short American lady who was selling him barrels from Burgundy at the time. Her name was Becky Wasserman. And he gave her some of those bottles of South Block. And she took them back to France and sat on them for a while.

[00:43:28] And then she was invited to be a judge at a wine Olympics that was sponsored by a French food magazine called Go Mio. And she entered those bottles into the wine Olympics. And in the Pinot Noir category, our dinky little tiny plot of 10 vines placed in the

[00:43:50] top 10 out of a lot of wines from around the world, including some from Burgundy. And it was a startling result. But maybe not entirely unpredictable because the wines in that Paris tasting, the Burgundies were a department store label. Sort of Nicose wines.

[00:44:09] So interestingly, and to his credit, Robert Drouin restaged the tasting the next year at Bonne with his own wines and the same judges. So Becky got to go back and be a judge again.

[00:44:21] You look at the people who were judging, it was folks like Jean Toigre and Stephen Spurrier. Very wide. I mean, the list of judges is pretty impressive. And in that second tasting, the top wine was 59 Chambord Muesigny, which scored 70 points.

[00:44:40] And the second wine was Irie 1975 Saint-Blanc, which scored 69.8. And then 61 Chambord Tannes Clos de Besse with 66 points. It was a startling result. And it got Irie written about in the New York Times. It was national and international recognition that there was something going on in Oregon.

[00:45:05] So the impact of that press might have been fairly short-term, you know, sort of the three-month period of excitement and then back to the grind again, except that we suddenly started experiencing this wave of curiosity from Burgundy.

[00:45:22] Growers from Burgundy coming here to visit in the early 80s, including and especially Robert Drouin and his daughter Veronique. Veronique came and worked for us for a harvest in 1986 and also with Adelsheim and Bethel Heights.

[00:45:38] And then in 1987, I stayed with the Drouins and got the opportunity to work in their cellar. And actually while I was there, Robert told me that they had finalized purchase on some land just right up the hill from my parents.

[00:45:52] And I have to say that the effect of those tastings in Paris and Beaune, the resonance, the long-standing positive result of that was not the press accolades. It was the presence of the Drouin family who brought so much credibility to what we were doing here.

[00:46:11] That happens when you're a teenager. And so did you see a shift in your life? I think it was kind of hand to mouth before that, right? Did things change appreciably? Well, oh God, did they change?

[00:46:22] Well, first of all, the thing that changes is starting in 1980, Dad stops making Merlot and Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc from purchased grapes. He's back to Pinot Noir, and gratefully so. And I can remember Christmases got a lot more abundant. There were a lot more presents under the tree.

[00:46:45] I could wear pants that my brother hadn't worn first. It was wonderful. And another way that we see kind of the prosperity is that Dad starts being able to, he'd always library wines, but he starts putting more wines in the library.

[00:46:58] Like for him, that's the best result of the tasting is now he can sell wine to sort of underwrite his idiosyncratic desire to stash a bunch of his wines aside so that people have a chance to try them later.

[00:47:11] Which has really been a benefit I think throughout your whole life. Like you've drunk a lot of old Mounier from your dad, right? Yeah, Pinot Mounier. To me, when I was a kid and on my birthday, I was allowed to go down to the cellar and

[00:47:24] pull any bottle I wanted. I'd often go for an older Mounier. I'm just fascinated by how that grape ages. But I think that the biggest benefit of the library, and this is exactly what Dad would

[00:47:38] have wanted to see happen with this, is that it helps people understand that Oregon is a great region. If you can't prove your wines are going to age, you can't prove you're a great region.

[00:47:48] The catch 22 of that, of course, is that if nobody knows your region, nobody's going to age your wines. So my dad made this very idiosyncratic decision to hold back fairly important chunks of production and just put them in the cellar, put them in the library.

[00:48:06] When my father passed away, I was able to go in and do a really thorough inventory. And I brought the spreadsheet to my mom and I showed it to her and she burst into tears. And I said, don't worry, Mom. It's all right.

[00:48:20] He wanted us to have these wines. And she said, I'm not angry. I'm pissed. Because she was thinking about sort of like all the things that we had done without over all those years and how much of that capital was tied up in these wines.

[00:48:36] The same year that he died, which was 2008, you held a tasting of all the vintages that he had made, which is something that a lot of people can't do. A lot of wineries can't do that.

[00:48:46] It's fantastic to be able to go back and look at history that way. As a winemaker, it's really helpful. As I venture into a vintage and feel the resonance to vintages that I've experienced in the past,

[00:48:58] I'm able to go back to the cellar and pull wines from those vintages and see, okay, so in 74 we had the larger berries and things were a little bit cooler at harvest. And so let's see how that 74 is doing.

[00:49:10] That question can be answered really succinctly through wine much more than it can be through any of the written records of the vintage. So what kind of taster was your dad? Like how did he engage with wine? Dad was kind of a taster in the English mold.

[00:49:25] He's kind of more experiential. He wouldn't provide a laundry list of descriptors. He was much more in tune with how the wine made you feel, what it evoked within your own personality. And, you know, because he had studied philosophy and rhetoric, he was also a fan of precision.

[00:49:44] And so if you couldn't describe a thing, don't use an analogy. There's no truth value in an analogy, he would say, you know. So his tasting notes were very technical until they became spiritual. And when they became spiritual, they were descriptions of how the wine made him feel,

[00:50:01] the joy that it brought. And really, there was no greater compliment that he could give to a Pinot Noir than it tasted like Pinot Noir. He early on and continued to despise techniques that sort of obscured the expression of the variety.

[00:50:16] So early on, he moved away from using a lot of New Oak because he felt like New World wines can't handle a lot of New Oak. He never sort of followed the trend of moving towards more extraction and enzymes and the boom boom 90s school of winemaking.

[00:50:34] He almost kind of went opposite. Like, I see his wines become even more delicate and linear through the 90s. They age really well. But, you know, he's clearly sort of working in reaction to the culture at the time.

[00:50:47] He kind of rails against that, those big wines, in some of the later interviews in his life. Yeah, he always felt like there was a real kind of lack of respect for the lack of sophistication in Americans about understanding what Pinot Noir is.

[00:51:05] You know, we judge books by the cover, for better or worse, and we judge Pinot by the color. And he felt like that was definitely for the worst. He said that in Pinot Noir, color and flavor exist in an inverse ratio, which means his

[00:51:18] color goes up, flavor goes down. That's an interesting thing to say because if you're trying to extract color from Pinot Noir, the best way to do it is by raising the temperature of the fermentation.

[00:51:31] And if you've made soup, you know that the best time to throw in the herbs isn't when you start making the soup, but right at the end because those volatile aromatics can get boiled off by the heat of fermentation.

[00:51:42] And so he liked short, cool fermentations that didn't lock in a lot of color. But what color there was, was very stable. You know, you won't see a lot of sediment at the bottom of an old bottle of irie because

[00:51:55] the color that went into the bottle was there to stay. Now, how did he approach stems? Well, I have a funny story about stems. You know, my father's final vintage that he worked with 2007, and I had charge of everything

[00:52:08] in the winery, but there was one thing that I didn't want charge of, and that was a South Block Pinot Noir. He came into the winery on the day that we picked the South Block, and he came over to

[00:52:18] the destemmer, and he looked at the grapes, he looked at the stems, and you know, he's moving really slow at this point. He's got an oxygen tank. He will not, will not use a walker.

[00:52:32] You know, he's just kind of feeling his way along with his hands as he walks. And he looks at the fermenter, and he goes back to the destemmer, and he gets a ball

[00:52:45] of stems out of the back end of the destemmer, and he walks over to the fermenter, shuffles might be a better word, and drops them in. You know, we're all standing there kind of horrified in case he like falls over with

[00:52:56] his arm full of stems, and you know, he kind of dusts his hands off after he puts the stems in. And I said, dad, why did you do that? And he said, just wait.

[00:53:05] And yeah, by golly, after that had fermented and this incredible sort of smell, stems in 2007 were very, very ripe because it was a long window of maturation in that year. Very cool harvest and long maturation.

[00:53:19] And there was just kind of this electric aroma that came off of that fermenter when we put it in the press. And I felt like he'd split the atom, you know, discover the grand unification theory. I used stems in 2007 for the first time in my winemaking career.

[00:53:36] And it was fun tasting those wines with dad later because we tasted the wines and I said something like, oh, isn't it cool that you put those stems in there? And he looked at me very seriously and he said, Jason, I never use stems.

[00:53:53] So it would have been a basket press? We had a couple of basket presses, horizontal basket presses made in Germany. We got the first one of these in 1975. Then we bought another in 78.

[00:54:05] And I thought these were both brand new machines, but I was told by our equipment dealer actually that they had been reconditioned. So they may have been 20, 30 years old by the time we got to them. We still have one today and we've reconditioned that one as well.

[00:54:21] I think a key part of our winemaking is the basket press and the dynamics of that pressing and how the press cake itself kind of acts as a fining and filtration medium as the juice winds its way out into the press pan.

[00:54:36] Do you use that press juice or is it just a wine? Press juice or do you discard it? Well, it's interesting. We got a pneumatic press and I'm realizing that press juice has to be handled very differently from a pneumatic press than it does from a basket press.

[00:54:52] The basket press press juice is the heart of the wine. That's the best component. That's where the nerve and the guts are. You know, in the pneumatic press, because the pressing dynamics are different,

[00:55:06] press juice, you have to approach it a little bit more tenderly and sort of understand its place in the cuvee and try to figure out how it fits and maybe age it in a smaller container versus a larger one just so it's a little bit more oxidative.

[00:55:21] It tames the tannins a bit in the case of a red. So these are kind of considerations that you have to take with a pneumatic press that you would never have had to take with a more traditional press.

[00:55:31] So he would have used that press wine from the basket press? Oh, absolutely. The press wine and the free run went together into the settling vessel, settled overnight, went to barrel. And I think that's the right approach.

[00:55:44] When I go back and look at times when we've separated press wine from free run from the basket press, I feel like brother and sister didn't get to grow up together. And when you reunite them later, the junction is never quite as seamless.

[00:55:58] So did your dad talk with you about different vintages? What some of those harvests have been like? So I have all of his harvest records and his harvest notes are beautifully detailed and illustrated and very thorough.

[00:56:11] I don't know how the guy had the time because I know the kind of hours he was working, and I'm sure a lot of those notes were written at two or three in the morning. But I have the ability to have that conversation now.

[00:56:24] Growing up, of course, I heard him talk about vintages to people. And so I have a pretty good understanding of how he felt about vintages. I'm not a big believer in vintage. I feel like the reason that we talk about vintage is because vintage changes every year.

[00:56:40] And certainly if you're in the wine press and you need something new to write about, vintage is what there is. Producers change every generation. That's a much slower churn. And for me, I'd prefer to buy producer over vintage.

[00:56:54] Give me a bad quote unquote vintage from a great producer and I'm going to be much happier. A great quote unquote vintage from an average producer. What I mean is like, were there certain vintages where it affected your life appreciably?

[00:57:10] Like, were there certain ones where you're like, well, dad's not coming back to the house tonight? You know, that kind of thing. For a wine grower, vintage is like a scrapbook, right? It's like looking through a family album.

[00:57:21] You see pictures from years that were hard and years that were easy. And looking through vintage is the same way. It's harder to pen maybe a winemaker down on qualitative differences in vintages. Because when I taste the 1984 vintage, which was just a logistical nightmare.

[00:57:42] Rain and wet and things not ripening until well into November when winter is not just breathing down our necks but has come down upon us like 84. Difficult. I get a lot of joy drinking 84 because it makes me remember that crazy vintage, you know,

[00:57:59] my ability to help at that time because I was 14 and like big enough to actually contribute. So there's like, I taste that vintage and I'm experiencing a whole range of emotions that somebody just coming coldly to the glass isn't going to get.

[00:58:14] You know, when I look back at great vintages in Oregon and using that word lightly, knowing that I put such primacy on who made it, not what year it came from. Um, 73, I think was the first of our great vintages.

[00:58:30] Everything that I've had from 73 has been just full of vibrancy, energy, great fruit, great balance. 75 obviously. 76 is the brother variety, a little bit more botanic and dense than the 75. 79 is a vintage that started off light and gained a little bit of gravitas with time.

[00:58:57] 77, your vintage, is another one of those vintages that started off on the light side and sort of pulled itself together in the bottle with time. 80, a fantastic vintage. 81, quite good. 83, really sensational. 85, quite good.

[00:59:18] In the 80s, there was a lot of back and forth with the Burgundians, which you kind of alluded to. There was people visiting Oregon and then you as a teenager going to Burgundy with your family. Yeah, absolutely. I went to Burgundy the first time when I was 13.

[00:59:34] And it's a little bit like if you're a Buddhist going to Dharamsala or if you're a Jew going to Jerusalem, it's going to the promised land. It's going to the place of all these myths and all these stories, the place of origin. It's really powerful.

[00:59:50] And I was very lucky that my father, through his personal connections to growers and also through his connection with Becky Wasserman, we were able to spend days and days of time with people like the Lafarges and the Potels.

[01:00:06] Andre Musi, who was a very old man at that time, completely changed my dad's approach in the cellar to de-stemming, for example. Okay, let's stop the interview for a moment right here.

[01:00:19] Jason has just said that Andre Musi was a big influence on his father in terms of winemaking technique. But who was Andre Musi? That's what you may be asking. So let me play for you a clip from episode 464 of this program where Russell Hohn describes Andre Musi.

[01:00:37] There was a wonderful old character called Andre Musi in Pomar, and that was absolutely a splendid visit always. The wines were quite rusty and so-and-so, but we sold them quite well for a time, you'd say really sort of old-fashioned. Had the most incredible hands.

[01:00:54] They were sort of like the size of meat plates, were really sort of gnarled. Poor bastard had been captured at the beginning of the war and ended up in Russia and didn't come back.

[01:01:05] He didn't come back from Russia until 47, or prisoner in sort of East Germany and then Russia or whatever. What a splendid old character. Becky took him and his wife to, we went on a trip to the States and we got down to Los

[01:01:22] Angeles, we went to Spargo's, I think it was my birthday the other day. And here was this guy, really sort of red chiseled sort of features in a black leather sort of jacket.

[01:01:34] And of course the paparazzi thought, this old guy's got to be one of the stars of the stage and screen and so-and-so. What are they doing? It's where you look so mediatic and I'm saying, I don't think that.

[01:01:48] We'll be back to Jason Lett's interview and his realization about the significance to him of those visits in Burgundy as a young man right after this message from a sponsor. Would you like to hear more new episodes of I'll Drink to That?

[01:02:03] Consider making a gift donation to support the program. You can donate from anywhere by making use of the PayPal or Stripe links on the show website and that website is alldrinktothatpod.com. That's I-L-L-drinktothat-P-O-D dot com to directly support the show. Look for the PayPal or Stripe insignia.

[01:02:25] Direct donations are the number one reason that this show continues to exist. Do your part today. So, those were powerful visits from a cultural point of view. It's where I began to understand that what we were doing which seemed so idiosyncratic

[01:02:43] and weird compared to what the other kids in the farm zone around here, what their families were up to actually had context. There was a much bigger story to be told here and I just thought it was us.

[01:02:57] So, it was a really powerful personal experience to be able to go to Burgundy that young. You went back, as you said, and you worked with Juan and you spoke with a number of Burgundy growers.

[01:03:10] Yeah, I've been lucky to be able to keep going back to making that pilgrimage. The first pilgrimage was as a 17-year-old when I went to work for Juan. You know, when I came back from Burgundy at 13, I was super motivated to go back.

[01:03:24] It was a place that I wanted to experience more deeply. I worked my ass off every year in the vineyard to save up enough money to go back. When I went there at 17, it was a culmination of a long dream.

[01:03:37] But, you know, at 17, I was transitioning in the way that young adults do into sort of moving away automatically from assuming that you're going to do what your parents do into trying to understand who I was and what I wanted to do.

[01:03:51] And so, I went to Burgundy, but I went with reservations about sort of wine and whether I wanted to do it. So, I didn't immerse myself as fully as I wish I could have. And God, I regret that opportunity now, you know?

[01:04:11] But I have had opportunities to go back and sort of re-immerse myself again, mostly in 1999. So, when I came back to the domain in 98, you know, I was ready to go to grad school. I finished undergrad really successfully.

[01:04:27] You know, I had great prospects in a PhD program if I wanted to go that direction. And I told my dad that I was kind of interested in this whole wine thing and why don't I go get an advanced degree?

[01:04:39] And he looked at me like I was crazy and he said, why don't you just take part of that money and go travel? So, you know, that seemed reasonable. Like, I can always do grad school later. So, I traveled.

[01:04:50] My wife and I went, visited, I don't know, 20, 30 producers in Burgundy. We worked in New Zealand. We traveled through Switzerland. We traveled to Germany. A little bit in Italy. Even a bit in England. And it was that Jerusalem moment all over again.

[01:05:11] But coming at it from a point of view of being much more intentional and engaged in the wine business, not just feeling like a 17-year-old spectator, but as, you know, a 29-year-old participant and somebody kind of deeply committed to shaking things up at IRI a bit.

[01:05:30] Bringing in ideas from other places. But also understanding that I had a place in this world that I didn't know that I had before. Adam You also had the chance to meet a couple people who have since passed away, like Roman Linier and Patrick Bies.

[01:05:44] Yeah, I've been super lucky. I think somebody who influenced me hugely early on was actually Gerard Potel, whose amazing hospitality in the cellar, you know, in his own house, to this no-nothing 13-year-old just completely gave me this great understanding of the absolutely profound hospitality that Burgundians can extend.

[01:06:10] And it's almost a cultural reflex, but Gerard was a master of executing that perfect hospitality and enthusiasm for the wines that he was making and the differences that sight creates in the wines. As a 13-year-old in his cellar, tasting with my father, we must have run through 80 barrels.

[01:06:28] And the fact that he was just as willing to thieve for me as he was for my dad just really floored me. In fact, during that visit, Gerard gave me a little snail fossil that he pulled out of

[01:06:40] one of his vineyards I still carry it around today. So it's an important talisman for me. Adam Okay, Jason just spoke about someone really important. So let's take a moment to talk about Gerard Potel. Gerard Potel used to run Domaine de la Pouste d'Or in Volnay,

[01:06:56] and he made the wine there until his death in 1997. And Potel, as Jason said, was known to be really generous to visiting tasters. And that was something Russell Hone also recalled in his interview. Russell Hone Pouste d'Or, he always used to sort of

[01:07:12] phase you by producing things like the half bottles of 66 you'd finish having drunk a sort of 1990 Pouste d'Or and then you go and you drink a 66 half bottle of Saint-Denis Gravier or the

[01:07:28] Tavern and so and so which would be extraordinary because it would be so good so young that you just were groping in the dark in terms of trying to guess the vintage. Adam But the importance of Gerard Potel went far

[01:07:42] beyond pouring wine for visitors. Potel both inspired and instructed a number of key people. And for example, this is what Jacques Sais had to say about Gerard Potel in All Drink to That, episode 470. Your dad had a share in Pouste d'Or in Volnay.

[01:08:00] Jacques As my father is a shareholder of Pouste d'Or, I visit Pouste d'Or from the beginning in 64. I become friends with Gerard Potel who is a few years older than me and I feel this is a great life.

[01:08:21] Adam So you went and did a harvest with Gerard Potel at Pouste d'Or. Jacques I did, my dad gave me two weeks vacation and called Gerard and said you have to destroy him or it inoculates a bug to him.

[01:08:38] And I was exhausted every night but I came back to Paris and said to my dad that's what I want to do in life. Adam What was Gerard Potel like at that time?

[01:08:49] Jacques I think we both enjoyed good food and good wine. And he had a sense of wine, he has a sense of creation of wine to feel what was wrong, what could be done to

[01:09:06] express the maximum possibility of the berries. Adam So that's actually kind of unusual because that's sort of still the Negociant era and what he was doing was changing his method to the

[01:09:17] conditions of the vintage which seems kind of a given today but maybe at that time that was less the conversation. The conversation would have been maybe more about standardizing things to a certain flavor profile and here was somebody looking to bring out vintage characteristics with different

[01:09:33] methods to the year. Jacques I think Gerard like me had the chance to be first generation. Gerard wanted to make the best wine possible and he had no recipe for that. He will do what he felt

[01:09:52] should be done. Adam Gerard used a sorting table at that time? Jacques Yes, he was probably one of the first ones to use a sorting table in Burgundy. Adam And then he also used to use whole cluster

[01:10:04] in Burgundy. Jacques He was using whole cluster for I would say 70 to 90 percent of the crop. I love the wine of Gerard, I love the wine of Rousseau, I love the wine of Bernard Clair-Dau,

[01:10:25] and so talking with them I just followed the way they were it would work. I followed the path of those people. I think Potel was one that pushed me to Native Yeast

[01:10:41] and when Gerard Potel called me saying what you look for is for sale, I jumped on it. The property for sale had one hectare of Closane-Ni, half hectare of Clos Roche, one hectare of Gevraet Premier Cru Combotte, and two hectares of Maurice-Anne-Ni.

[01:11:01] Not only did Potel inspire Jacques Seyss to become a vigneron, he also found for Jacques the property that would then become the basis of Domaine du Jacques. And Jacques used a number of techniques

[01:11:12] he picked up from Gerard Potel and others in his own early winemaking at Du Jacques, such as the use of a sorting table, use of whole cluster, and native yeast fermentation. Something you often hear

[01:11:24] about Gerard Potel is that he was ahead of his time when it came to techniques and methods, and here is something else that Jacques Seyss told me in relation to that topic. Gerard Potel was concerned by the delay between malolactic and bottling. His

[01:11:43] view was 9 to 12 months after malolactic, and I think it's not a bad idea. Bottling earlier to preserve fruit is something that is pretty commonplace at many domains in Beringia today, but that would have been something that was different back when Gerard Potel was

[01:12:03] talking about it, and the story doesn't just stop there. For instance, listen to what Dominique Lafon told me in episode 438. Gerard Potel is very, very strong in my memory and showed me a lot.

[01:12:21] How you decide harvest, when you think it's ripe, what should it taste like, how you process the grapes, how you handle it, how you handle a tank, and what was their vision of wine,

[01:12:33] what they think of wine, and what is their vision. And it was very good for me because it gave me other visions than my father's vision. So I've quickly understood there was not one way

[01:12:46] to make wine, and you could get to high-quality wine many different ways. Dominique is clear about how much Gerard Potel inspired his own thinking, and Potel had that impact on multiple people, including many from Dominique Lafon's generation, those people who came up in the 80s.

[01:13:05] For instance, listen to whose name comes up when I ask Christophe Rumier about his decision to end chemical farming and fertilization of his vineyards. And remember, if you heard Christophe Rumier in episode 476, this choice that we're talking about in terms of the farming was one

[01:13:22] of the biggest decisions of his entire career. With Dominique Lafon, because we are good friends, we have talked a lot of that. And also with Jacques Sesse, Gerard Potel, Jacques d'Angerville, these were people who we've talked a lot also around all this. When you understand Gerard

[01:13:43] Potel's contribution to other vineyards in Burgundy, it's easy then to understand why Michel Lafarge was so complimentary about Potel in his interview in episode 249, which was translated by Daniel Jonas. He was an extraordinary man.

[01:14:10] He contributed greatly to Volney. He was a very complete man. He was an engineer, trained as an engineer. He had the luck to come to Volney in 1964. It was a good year to start. He succeeded his 64s incredibly. And he befriended many vineyards in Volney.

[01:15:03] And he brought a lot to the village in terms of character and spirit. He was open and available to all vineyards of the village, and very well respected by all the vineyards. He was able to demonstrate the responsibility of what each vineyard has to live up to.

[01:16:08] And even Olive Burgundy has to thank him because he was responsible for carrying through a number of reforms that have been very successful and important for Burgundy. To improve the quality of Burgundy.

[01:16:32] It's clear from what has been already said how generous with his ideas Gerard Potel could be, and he spurred on numerous people to do better work in their own properties. But unfortunately it began to all go wrong when Gerard Potel shared his ideas with the

[01:16:48] wrong person, as Becky Wasserman remembered in her interview. And you knew Gerard Potel quite well? Very well. Very, very well. It was Jacques Seyss who introduced us to Gerard. A man ahead of his

[01:17:02] time. Really ahead of his time in terms of what his thoughts about vinification and viticulture were. And very sadly, my importers wanted us to do tastings for certain very influential writers. And I would ask the writer if I could have people, winemakers along so that we didn't

[01:17:23] have to open two or three hundred bottles and not only for one person. And there was a writer who thought that the root of all evil was filtration. And Gerard got very upset by this and said,

[01:17:38] I'm going to invite him over because I wish to explain that in many years you do not need to. In certain years you do. But there is filtration done by a heavy-handed person and there is

[01:17:50] filtration that is so delicate, you know? And then the article came out and Pustor filters, our market went down in the United States by 80%. Not good. Not good. And it is this decline in sales for the wines of Domaine de la Pustor in the United States

[01:18:15] that is in the background of this remark from Dominique Lafon, speaking about when he used to work for Becky Wasserman. When I started working with Becky, that was when the dollar was 10 to the franc and it was crazy. Crazy. The market opened in the U.S.,

[01:18:32] the wines were not that expensive in Burgundy and as I told you before, I could sell wine on the phone. But at the same time, which seems strange nowadays, I had to supply some importers

[01:18:47] to buy Pustor and tell them this is good and the vintage is good, you should go for it. And I would have some importers say, maybe, I'm not sure, but I don't want to take all the wines.

[01:18:59] And nowadays, if you look at what we have sold, everybody would beg to get it. It's this period of declining sales for the wines of Pustor that Russell Hone also had in mind

[01:19:12] when I asked him about Gérard Potel. Well, there was a hiccup with Gérard because we did fantastic trade with him through the 80s until, it must have been 87 or 88 or something, when he got trashed by Parker.

[01:19:32] And so because we were selling much less, I think we had something like 700 or 800 cases in the States in the year with the 85s and stuff. And by the end of that time, he got pissed off.

[01:19:48] But remained a friend and so on. What was so foolish was that, because Becky had found the syndicate in 85 to buy out the sales share. And what was so silly is he didn't tell

[01:20:06] that he was in trouble with that syndicate when it came to 95 or 96, 96 was the last vintage. And strain and stress and everything, he had the heart attack. He hadn't told Becky that this was a problem.

[01:20:30] Gérard Potel died from a heart attack at the age of 61. And had he lived longer, he might well have received the accolades that he missed out on during the difficult period

[01:20:40] leading up to his death. It is said that he died on the same day that Pustor was sold. May he rest in peace. Patrick Beese, who I met several times, is a big influence. And Roman Ligne probably

[01:21:03] motivated me and changed my life in ways that nobody else in the world of wine has, just by a conversation we had in Becky's backyard one day. Roman, as you might know, stepped into the domain quite young. I think he was 21 when he did his first vintage.

[01:21:23] And he was uncompromising, but also because of the fact that his parents had trusted him to do that so early, had a perspective on Burgundy that was quite a bit different, I think, maybe

[01:21:39] than many of the people there. He was also quite well-traveled. When we met Roman, his lady friend was from New Mexico. And so he was in touch with sort of the culture of the United States,

[01:21:49] as well as what was going on in Burgundy. And Roman kind of terrified me, kind of backed me into a corner at a tasting at Becky Wasserman's house. I really felt like he sought me out. I tasted at

[01:22:04] his cellar a few days before. He'd obviously been thinking and there was something he really wanted to tell me. And he said, I know a lot of winemakers who come back to the domain 30, 35 years old and they've lost the spirit. They're happy to accommodate the ways that

[01:22:24] their fathers did things and they've lost that will. You need to make wine before you're 35 or you'll never make a good one. And, oh my God, those words just went straight to my core because

[01:22:40] you know, like many Burgundians, my dad was a man who knew what he wanted in the cellar and knew how to get there. He'd had enough finishes under his belt that he had a really established

[01:22:52] route to make the wines he wanted to make. And here I was out in the world accumulating all this knowledge and not knowing that I would be able to come home and use any of it.

[01:23:02] And so Roman's words were really a goad. They really pushed me when I came back and probably responsible for some friction between my dad and I, but I think ultimately things worked out okay. You took a couple of sojourns away. You studied desert plant ecology for a while

[01:23:21] and then you had your own wine project also in the Willamette Valley, right? Yeah, I guess at the time that I was visiting Burgundy when I was 17, I was thinking of myself

[01:23:33] as a writer. I'd won some writing competitions and went on to study that a bit in college. Learned that wasn't for me, then kind of sidestepped into science. I spent a lot of

[01:23:44] time kind of looking for me, what I wanted. What was really funny was that I wound up doing desert ecology, kind of looking at how plants interact with their environment. And I was away from the

[01:23:59] domain for 10 years and I was, you know, the last five of those studying plants really intensively in their environmental interaction. And it never dawned on me, Levi, that wine is absolutely the encapsulation of how plants interact with their environment. So that first harvest back after 10

[01:24:21] years was like this sort of revelation. You lock up an entire vintage in a bottle and every single one of the hundred days that that plant experiences is in that wine. That is an amazing thing. So I

[01:24:37] came back to wine just kind of overjoyed with this revelation that this was what I had been studying to do all this time. But you know, the nuts and bolts of family interactions? Business is hard.

[01:24:48] Family is hard. If you put family and business together, it's really hard. So, you know, Dad and I always loved each other, but there was a lot of

[01:24:56] kind of tension between us at the workplace. And Mom had to be in the middle and my wife had to be in the middle. And, you know, it was bad for our family. So my dad and I agreed to work apart

[01:25:11] in the early 2000s and that was a good decision. I went off and I started a label called Black Cap. That was kind of a conversation with my dad, but using wine as the medium. So I was using like

[01:25:23] Vadensville and Pommard 50-50 blends the way that Dad did, but I was using, you know, different approaches in the winery and putting to work a lot of those things that I learned in France and trying desperately to get underneath that arbitrary 35-year-old cutoff date that Roman Ligne had

[01:25:41] assigned to me. And the amazing, almost limitless ability to study and learn and be surprised. I mean, I've participated in every vintage since 1973 with the exception of a few where I was at

[01:25:57] college and I get taken to school every year by Mother Nature. And it's a pleasure and it's a frustration, but ultimately it's a huge source of energy just to, you know, constantly be reintroduced

[01:26:10] to your own ignorance and understand that you're part of a bigger place. And I think wine does that for people in a way that, you know, nothing else besides perhaps food does.

[01:26:22] One of the things that I think you've done since taking over after your father got ill was you brought some new approaches to the farming. Since I took over winemaking in 2005, and that was a difficult transition, you know, that required

[01:26:38] my dad actually to realize that he had to fully step aside, not just partially. So since that time I haven't changed the basic philosophy that built the Ivory Vineyards, you know, which is basically to

[01:26:53] take a lot of attention to detail in the vineyard and not overwork things in the winery. So my dad had a low tolerance for paperwork. We had been farming organically ever since the first

[01:27:07] vines went in, but he never went to the trouble to fill out the forms to certify. So I have a slightly higher tolerance for paperwork and we're able to make ourselves official.

[01:27:19] You know, dad was a very low-till farmer. He almost never tilled the vines or if he did he tilled in row. One of the things that was forced upon us when Phylloxera came to the vineyard, which

[01:27:31] ironically is the same year that I started, was to stop moving the soil around. So no more in-row cultivation. So since my time we haven't cultivated the soil at all except in very young plantings.

[01:27:46] You know, I've gone away from copper. Copper is part of a traditional Bordeaux blend. It's what gives it that kind of blue color. I love seeing Burgundians, you know, get off the sprayer. They're

[01:27:57] totally blue. They look like smurfs. But copper is incredibly toxic and it can't be good for those people and it's certainly not good for their soil. And this was pointed out to me in Switzerland,

[01:28:08] actually when I was studying there. Like you can see on the ground that the ground is poisoned by copper in vineyards that were over sprayed over the last 100-200 years. The ground cover is actually different in those vineyards because there are only certain plants that can tolerate

[01:28:25] that amount of copper. And so you can see it on the ground and that definitely has to be affecting the vines lower down. Most people don't realize because we just see the part of the vine that's

[01:28:34] above the ground, like that's only 40-60% of the mass of the plant. The other half is underground and only half of the sugar that the vine makes goes to building leaves and stems and ripening fruit. The other half is pumped underground to feed organisms growing around the roots.

[01:28:54] So vines are really intimately connected into this whole ecological internet of what's growing around them. And so when you introduce something like copper that changes the balance, you're changing the wine. So I moved away from copper. We now use milk whey from the Tillamook Dairy down

[01:29:12] the road which it doesn't kill mildew the way that copper does but it does control it. It's like birth control for powdery mildew which is awesome. That actually comes from my days working in greenhouses at the University of New Mexico looking for ways to keep desert plants

[01:29:32] which aren't used to humid conditions from getting mildew. And so I goofed around with garlic and then I found a paper that had been written by a Brazilian guy who was growing zucchini in a

[01:29:43] greenhouse and of course they get mildew like crazy. And he just basically opened up his refrigerator sprayed everything he could find and came up with this idea about milk. So Hugo Bediol was his name.

[01:29:57] One of the things that you've done is you've gone out and found some vine material that was interesting to you and then you've brought it back to Dundee specifically with like trousseau.

[01:30:07] We were lucky early on in that you know when dad made his choices about what to bring up he brought up stuff from University of California that was even though they were using really primitive

[01:30:18] methods to see if the vines had virus or not basically grafting them onto a repestorous St. George rootstock and seeing if they showed virus signs or not. But we can go back and look

[01:30:29] at those original vines and find old stock that is completely virus free which kind of makes our vineyard a little bit of a time machine in itself because a lot of those early selections at Davis

[01:30:42] were ripped out in the early 70s and no longer exist in the National Collection anywhere except at our vineyard. So I've actually looked inward for a lot of the selections that we're planting from. When I've looked outward like trousseau we were lucky that trousseau was brought into the

[01:31:01] United States in the 1950s in Davis's effort to try to catalog the different varieties from around the world. A lot of the varieties that we have to draw from now that are new fresh and young

[01:31:14] have actually been in the states for quite a while as a result of these kind of collecting binges from the Davis professors. We've spoken a little bit about trousseau, we've spoken a little

[01:31:22] bit about chassolat but we haven't touched on some of the other wines that you make these days so maybe we could just kind of go grape variety by grape variety. So dad had hoped in his original

[01:31:34] business plan to make 10,000 cases of wine and by 1991 he was making 10,000 cases of wine but he was only making seven different bottlings out of that. But I've taken the insanity even further and now I bottle 22 different varieties and that's basically just because I'm trying to learn.

[01:31:52] You know one of the things I did was to split our Pinot Noir. We used to just blend all the estate vineyards together into one bottling and I've kind of teased those apart. I make five single

[01:32:03] vineyard Pinot Noirs, I make all those wines exactly the same way in the same size fermenter, all of them have wild yeast, all of them have the same percentage of new oak but this allows me to

[01:32:15] see how those different vineyards age and relate to one another. And I'm learning so much about the geology and the climactic bands even within our little tiny strip of the Dundee Hills. You know I'm planting new Pinot Meunier. We've made Pinot Meunier for

[01:32:33] ever since our first vintage. It's really exciting to plant new Pinot Meunier. Planting younger vines gives us the opportunity to attack some new challenges that are coming at us. How are we going to grow grapes under a regime of climate change when we don't want to irrigate?

[01:32:54] And how are we going to do that in a way that echoes the viticulture of the past at Irie? We're just trying a lot of rootstocks including a lot of rootstocks that are old and out of favor

[01:33:06] and finding actually those are giving us the lower yields, the higher acidities, and the drought tolerance that we're looking for. It's funny if you go back and look at the European books about those same rootstocks they talk about them differently but of course their soils are

[01:33:23] really different. So you know I don't think any wine growing region should ever become complacent but especially a young region like ours. And so I'm continuing to explore new varieties and to

[01:33:38] see what works here and try new things. And really the best way to find out if something works is to plant it. A lot of the varieties that I'm working with there isn't a lot of knowledge about

[01:33:50] what climates they do work best in. You know there's just not a lot of documentation out there about Shasala for example. And as you mentioned earlier there's been a learning curve in terms of

[01:34:00] you pick that Shasala. So have there been other learning curves like that with some of the other grape varieties where you were like ah I see. Oh my god the learning curves just go on. I told you

[01:34:11] how kind of frustrating and wonderful it is at the same time to get taken to school by mother nature but yeah I made Shasala from well the first vintage we got a crop off of that was 2004 so

[01:34:23] that was before I was winemaker but 2005 to 2012 I made Shasala not much about you know 80 cases worth and it was terrible just tasted like salad oil. I couldn't understand what I wasn't understanding about the variety because I was picking it at where you'd pick Pinot Blanc or

[01:34:46] Pinot Gris or not an excessive ripeness level 22 bricks should be easy just I got so frustrated and we had this cool 2013 vintage and I had a lot of grapes that I wanted

[01:35:00] to pick and so I just said screw it let's go in let's pick the Shasala early. Let's at least get some acidity out of it if nothing else and the wine that resulted just like wow it suddenly hit

[01:35:12] all my buttons like having it be this sort of electric and vivifying food wine bang it was there and I could tell just right from the get-go that it was going that direction. That was super

[01:35:25] gratifying. Trousseau I screwed that up its first vintage so 2014 we had a baby crop off the Trousseau I didn't understand the ripening curve how it lags behind Pinot Noir and lags behind and lags behind

[01:35:39] and then suddenly shoots past it at the last minute and so when I picked the Trousseau I picked it at 26 bricks which is way too ripe so in 2015 I even more so than the Pinot Noir and the highest

[01:35:53] in things that we grow I was sampling Trousseau over and over and over again to find exactly that right moment because when Trousseau starts to ripen in that final rush it runs really fast

[01:36:04] so it took me a vintage to learn that and I'm continuing to refine that. What size barrel does it need? How long should it ferment? What level should it be pressed? These are all questions

[01:36:15] that each variety demands its own answers to. What's your current thought on Chardonnay? A lot of people are seemingly of the mind that Chardonnay still has a lot of potential in the Willamette

[01:36:29] Valley that hasn't been fully discovered yet. It kind of got into the shadow of Pinot Noir for this larger region at some point and now when I talk to people they seem excited about the future

[01:36:41] potential of Chardonnay here so what's your read? I'm so excited about the excitement. It's a variety that we've never given up on. If you look at the planting curve in the Willamette

[01:36:51] Valley the Chardonnay basically is on this upward curve all the way through the late 90s and then the curve suddenly dips. People are actively tearing out Chardonnay vineyards and that's because Chardonnay is difficult to make. There's all the labor and more of making Pinot Noir involved

[01:37:11] with Chardonnay and if you're not serious about the grape it's not something you should be playing with so it was good ultimately for Chardonnay that people who were less serious about working with it

[01:37:24] got rid of their acreage, went to something else. So this renaissance that we're seeing now around Chardonnay is the result of a lot of people coming back to the variety from a great place of intention and intention makes great wines and cynicism makes bad ones

[01:37:43] regardless of the variety. Pinot Gris actually is a story that makes me a bit sad because I feel like a lot of Pinot Gris coming out of our region and excuse me for being frank about this but that

[01:37:56] we could be doing a much better job. Pinot Gris is a variety that's got all the genes of Pinot Noir, it's as expressive as Pinot Noir, it doesn't deserve to be overcropped and kind of monkeyed

[01:38:08] with with residual sugar and excess acidity to balance the residual sugar and then pushed out the door far too young. I see that too often. Unfortunately maybe Chardonnay went through that same cycle where people were cynical and now they're coming back to it with intention and

[01:38:24] hopefully people will do that with Pinot Gris as well. So where do you think things are going to go in the next say 50 years? Well the culture has definitely changed since I was a kid. You know

[01:38:36] when I grew up on the hill there were other young farming families on the hill, they weren't farming grapes but there were other kids to hang out with. You know my kids live on the same hill I grew

[01:38:46] up on and there are no more children left on the hill. The ownership of the hill has changed a lot of the people who've bought vineyards or vineyard land and developed it into vineyards aren't full-time

[01:38:59] residents and just the whole kind of ambiance of wine country has changed. There's a lot of helicopters and drones that fly over my house every weekend. I can remember when we used to

[01:39:13] sit on the porch when a car would go by and it was such an unusual thing especially one that with an out-of-state plate. So the culture of growing up here has definitely changed. I think

[01:39:23] my kids work a lot less in the vineyards and the winery than I did at their age. The wine industry is less of a struggle and more of a profession these days and there's a lot more professionals

[01:39:36] coming in. Is that good? I don't know. You look at the folks from Bethel Heights, I don't think there's a science degree among them. You know there are doctors of divinity and master's degrees in romance language and those people make beautiful wines. So I think wine

[01:39:59] really respects the intellect and the curiosity of the people who make it and maybe professionalism might not best lend itself to curiosity and exploration. How do you feel now about the decision to stay on the family farm? Your dad passed away in 2008. Are you at peace with this

[01:40:20] route, this fate? No I'm not at peace. I'm never at peace. I just constantly am wanting to push and see where this thing goes. Did I find the right medium to express restlessness and curiosity

[01:40:36] and does this business give me an amazing vehicle to take care of people who I've worked with for decades? Yeah. So that part I'm really excited about but I don't ever feel complacent about

[01:40:48] what we're doing or where we're going. Everything still feels as much at risk as it always did and the rewards for that risk feel just as great. In some ways I have to apologize because

[01:41:01] I said, hey Jason why don't you come and we'll do an interview with you. Your dad is such a towering figure in this region that it's just hard not to talk about him a lot but it's your

[01:41:15] interview and we've spent a lot of time talking about your dad and I would think if the situations were reversed at some point I might get tired of talking about my dad and be like why don't you ask

[01:41:29] me a question about me? And in some way it would be tough to have that legacy in the same breath that it would also be so much of a leg up. Yeah I mean you're definitely like definitely

[01:41:46] finding that spot that's hard for me to negotiate as a person which is balancing that where we've been, paying honor to the legacy of the past and at what point does paying honor to the past block your ability to move forward and that's a constant negotiation I'm having.

[01:42:03] Well that's the one thing that you learn from biology is if something isn't changing it's dying and so for something to remain alive it has to change and so it has to change in a way that's natural to its environment that adapts as the environment changes around it

[01:42:18] and that's very important to Irie. I have to say though that probably the greatest legacy the thing that I've inherited that is of the most value isn't the vines, it isn't the winery,

[01:42:31] it isn't the barrels, it isn't the techniques, it's that nobody is surprised when we do something different. That that's just going to be what Irie does is continue to push boundaries a little bit. You know the result of all those decades of idiosyncratic moves has been that nobody's

[01:42:52] surprised when we do an idiosyncratic move and that is really great. The other legacy that I have and this was an accident is that we're not a cash cow, my mom is still living in the same house that

[01:43:04] they bought in 1970 and hasn't remodeled the kitchen since but at least we're financially independent. We've seen a couple of other pioneer wineries in the region lose their ownership to their investors and that's something I don't have to worry about and that's a tremendous strength

[01:43:21] going forward. You know, sentimentality though can be an evil. You know we're making wine in the converted turkey processing plant here in McMinnville that we did our first vintage in in 1970 and it's an awkward place to make wine but we've made some amazing wines there. At the same

[01:43:47] time that building was never built to stand as long as it did especially with 90% humidity inside of it and so we have to build a new winery and that's just one of the challenges coming up.

[01:43:59] We were lucky to be able to play with unrooted vines for 35-40 years before phylloxera struck but that era is ending and all of those vineyards need to be not ripped up and replanted but we take care of those old vines for as long as they'll go

[01:44:17] when we plant new acreage. Those are the challenges that I feel that I need to solve before I can in good conscience pass the winery to the next generation. And you think that that is something

[01:44:29] that will happen? You know, somebody used to print a t-shirt for winemaker kids that says I don't fucking know if I'm going into the wine business. Because I remember it as a kid a lot of

[01:44:42] people asked me, I don't know why there's this expectation. If you grow up and your parents own an auto parts business people aren't automatically going to ask you if you're going to go into auto

[01:44:52] parts after you graduate college but there's this sort of cultural assumption probably because of the long lines of heritage in Europe that in the wine business wineries are passed from generation to generation. And I feel like as in the most successful transitions in Europe and here it's

[01:45:10] important for the younger generation to go away because winemaking is such a hard and all-consuming job you really need to be prepared to do it on your own terms. So I provide my kids the opportunity to

[01:45:25] learn about wine and to taste wine and to work in the vineyard and to understand our ways of practice but I don't push them. I want them to come to that on their own.

[01:45:33] And what about grafted versus own-rooted vines? What have you seen as that transition is taking hold? European grapevines are in a lot of ways stronger than the American rootstocks that we graft onto. They go deeper because they evolved on drier hillsides than American vines

[01:45:55] and so they experience less drought stress. They don't experience as many trunk diseases. So grafted vines, you know, those vines are born with an injury. That graft union you've created and it's something that the vine has to live with for its entire lifespan. And unrooted vines don't

[01:46:14] have that basic injury to start from. So if I had my preference I would continue with unrooted vines. It's just impossible to do that. What do you think the biology lens has allowed you to see

[01:46:28] that maybe your father wouldn't have seen? What is studying plant ecology allowed you to see? What studying plant ecology has allowed me to do... I think my dad was working a lot from instinct

[01:46:42] when it came to how he was working in the vineyard and interacting with the nature around him. Whereas I have the advantage of being able to work from a basic knowledge of what's happening. But that

[01:46:55] knowledge is always changing. You know, we have a research group right now who's doing work quantifying soil biologies between vineyards and even kind of looking at tillage regimes and vine age and how soil biology changes. That's really exciting stuff. Plants in general are actually

[01:47:13] really lousy at uptaking minerals. They're super good at making sugar. They're terrible at making mineral or rather releasing it from the soil. But a lot of the soil organisms that they

[01:47:25] interact with are quite good at it. Now think about lichens. They can grow on rock. They eat rock. That's pretty awesome. And so those fungus have the ability to break down mineral into forms that plants can use. So quantifying that biological community, understanding the balance of fungus

[01:47:49] and bacteria to me is the key to understanding minerality in wine. Because the soil is really just the matrix and the plant is this organism and that interaction between the matrix and the organism is kind of like mediated or that connection is made through these other soil

[01:48:11] organisms that grow in the soil. So you can have all the mineral in the soil you want, but if the biology isn't there, the plant will never get it. Are there specific things that you can do to help the plant uptake those minerals?

[01:48:24] Yeah. This kind of goes back to a piece of my dad's philosophy actually where he felt like intervention on its own account was wrongheaded because humans have only been around for what, 50,000 years and grapevines have been around for 50 million. So grapevines know what they need.

[01:48:44] And if we just create a safe space for them, keep the mildew off of them, keep them trained so that they can see enough sunlight to ripen their fruit, and then keep the weeds and grass low enough so

[01:48:55] that they're not interfering with the fruit zone. Let the vines work it out the rest of the way. So, you know, when I came back to the estate, I was all ready to put down some organic compost

[01:49:09] to fertilize the vines because dad had never fertilized. I mean, it makes sense. When you harvest, you're taking out this many pounds of nitrogen and this many pounds of potassium and this many pounds of phosphorus. And my dad, to his credit, said, okay, which was not something dad

[01:49:27] would have done normally. But he did follow up with the question, which was, don't you think you should check first though? So yeah, I did. I took some plant tissue samples. I sent them out

[01:49:37] to the lab. I came back. No nutritional deficits. The vines have been, through their associations, quite happily getting what they needed from the ground. And I feel like there's this almost Judeo-Christian feeling, like we've left the Garden of Eden and that nature is broken,

[01:50:01] and that it was given to us as humans to fix nature. And that dad was coming from a different place where nature is perfect, let nature fix itself. When you look at farming systems that are invasive, either on one hand, let's say conventional agriculture and herbicides,

[01:50:22] and on the other, just to pick on biodynamics a little bit, like, oh, the system's broken. We need this magic formula to fix it. Both of those are sort of exercises in human arrogance. And I feel

[01:50:33] like they come from that same kind of place of nature is broken and we must fix it. So I understand the things that your family could be proud of when it comes to water.

[01:50:43] Your family could be proud of when it comes to wine in Oregon. But what are you proud of? You know, my working relationship with my mother, who's also my business partner, has been fantastic. And we've managed to meld business and family together

[01:51:01] and still be family. I mean, that's not the easiest tightrope to walk. I'm also proud of the fact that I'm bringing the right energy to the table to carry Irie forward another generation. You know, my dad had great energy to be a pioneer.

[01:51:18] He had those qualities that a pioneer needs, but he never would have had the patience to be a continuer and a tinkerer and a tweaker and a builder in the way that I am. You know,

[01:51:30] dad established what he wanted to do and boom, that was it. It was set in stone. And so I'm proudest of my ability, our ability, I speak as a winemaker, but I'm actually just part

[01:51:44] of a group of people who make the wine here, to remain intellectually flexible and continue to let the vine speak, but to try to find new ways to do it. But you also reminded me of something

[01:51:59] that happened when I was 17, again, pivotal year for me, I guess. New Year's Eve party, all my parents' friends were over. I was allowed to have wine whenever I wanted to, and at this particular junction for whatever, I allowed myself to have too much.

[01:52:16] And my dad kind of pulled me back into his office and he said, Jason, I notice you've kind of gone over the line there. Always remember that wine is sacrament. I never want to see you drunk again. And those are powerful words.

[01:52:34] Using wine as an alcohol delivery system is disrespecting the holy. That's what wine is sacrament means. And that's something that I've carried with me. Jason Lett realizes that wine can both be a struggle and a sacrament. Thank you very

[01:52:50] much for being here today. Thank you, Levi. I'm glad you came. Jason Lett of Irie Vineyards in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. All Drink to That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton, Aaron Skelton, Aaron Skella has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill

[01:53:09] Kimsey. The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tanoian. T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more, including show stickers, notebooks, and even gift wrap are available for sale if you check the show

[01:53:24] website alldrinktothatpod.com. That's I-L-L drinktothat, P-O-D dot com, which is the same place you'd go to sign up for our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show operating. You can donate from anywhere using PayPal or Stripe

[01:53:43] on the show website. Remember to hit subscribe or to follow this show in your favorite podcast app, please. That's super important to see every episode and thank you for listening. This episode was made possible by the Willamette Valley Wineries Association.

[01:54:15] That's the same association that organizes the annual Willamette Pinot Noir Auction, Oregon Pinot Camp, and Pinot in the City. For more information, please visit Willamettewines.com. That's Willamette with two L's, two E's, and two T's, wines, dot com.

[01:54:35] David Lett of Ivory Vineyards passed away in 2008 and near the end of his life in 2007, there was an interview recorded with him that is preserved in the Linfield College Archives. You can find that interview by going to YouTube and searching for David Lett, with two T's,

[01:54:53] Linfield Archives. The interview is about 45 minutes long and I suggest searching it out if you have an interest. What is the origin of the name Iry Vineyards? Iry is an old English word for a hawk's nest.

[01:55:10] My mother is an English major. She came up with the word. She joined my father about 14 months after he moved to Oregon. As they were moving the vines from the nursery site to the present vineyard,

[01:55:22] there was a tree overlooking the vineyard. There was a pair of hawks in the tree. The hawks were building their nest and having their babies. My parents were planting their vines and having their babies. My mom felt this real sense of connection with nature. That's what the name

[01:55:39] represents.