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This is a deep dive into the history of Oregon Chardonnay and is essential viewing for anyone studying the history of one of America’s most important growing regions.
See all of our videos with Chad Stock of Limited Addition Wines here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLddUmDhg4G_Kg1oas7H6T8BISEMPcWoK_
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Text of Video with Chad Stock:
Well, in the 1970’s when a lot of the original Chardonnay vines were planted there was no real identity for Oregon Chardonnay.
A lot of the original pioneers were planting Clone 108 and Draper
and feeling like they were competing with California style Chardonnay, and seeing
what they were developing here in Oregon was leaner, tiger in acidity, not quite as rich, not as opulent.
Being in a colder climate, they felt like maybe those weren’t the right genetics here for our climate.
“How can we more accurately emulate California?”, in a way. A lot of research led through the university of Dijon… names would escape me, I don’t know the people involved necessarily, but I know David Adlesheim here was the largely the direct connection here in Oregon.
Then, working on finding earlier ripening Chardonnay selections to take more advantage of our climate. And I think back then they were looking at trying to emulate something that was market driven instead of trying to find a unique identity for Oregon and trying to find the best vehicle to express the terroir in Oregon.
So what ended up happening in the late 1980’s, 86…88 is when I think a lot of these Dijon cuttings started to come over, they were brought into Oregon State University to be quarantined and double checked, and then they got released.
So there is all this early excitement, thinking “ok, here is this new material, I think we can really do something great” Plantings were initially somewhat limited because there were still not a lot of vineyards back then, and then say, five or six years go by, and some people that I know that made those conversions over to Dijon, were actually really disappointed in the early stages. The vines weren’t seemingly performing. But once they got to a point, say ten years of age or so, they felt that there was a lot more character and rebound that was happening, where the vines were expressing more of the soil.
It seemed to be that there was this immediate excitement, like “This is legitimate. This is going to get us to where we want to be”. And so word spread and then boom, it just kind of proliferated.
The plantings now here in Oregon for Chardonnay, by a percentage standard to Pinot Noir, is very small still. The last statistic I looked at on the Oregon Chardonnay Alliance website says that I think 90 or 92% of all the Chardonnay plantings here are planted to the Dijon Clones. And of the Dijon selections it’s three primary clones, the Dijon 95, 96 and 76.
And of those three it’s primarily 96 and 76.
So you have only a couple of different Chardonnay genetic sources here that are still relatively young and they are still kind of finding their own in the vineyards, but they’ve now been around long enough that they are starting to prove that they are maybe now no longer completely ideal to the climate.