Wine & Spirits - August 2017 - 8

FINED&

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Gamay Goes to Portland
by Rachel Signer

An hour after the doors opened on the afternoon of May 1, people were already wearing the I Love Gamay
event T-shirt: "The Gamay Made Me Do It," lettered in pink over black.

"Gamay strikes
a perfect balance
between freshness
and complexity."
-Bethany Kimmel
8

Inside Elder Hall, a small event space in Portland,
Oregon, glasses clinked and the young, tattooed
crowd posted their favorite labels on Instagram.
They were here for the first public tasting of gamay
wines from across Oregon. Bethany Kimmel, a
winemaker just releasing her first vintage, was
getting lots of attention as she poured her 2015
Color Collector, a lively, peppery wine with a solid
backbone of acidity. The photogenic label featured
a handwritten poem and an etching of a flower.
"For me, gamay strikes a perfect balance between
freshness and complexity," said Kimmel. Nearby,
Stedt-another brand-new winery-was pouring
a gamay pét-nat. There were fruity, carbonic wines
on offer, as well as more structured, oak-aged
bottlings.
Despite the fact that Oregon has a mere 30 acres
planted to gamay, the variety is enjoying a surge
in popularity, thanks to a new generation of urban
winemakers who've caught on to Beaujolais as a
relatively affordable and deliciously drinkable red.
Among them are Tom Monroe and Kate Norris,
the organizers of the event, who were turned on
to it while working a harvest in Fleurie, in 2009. As
Monroe recalls, "There were abandoned vineyards,
seventy-year-old vines, all over the place. You had
this feeling of desperation, that gamay was a castoff grape that would fade away into the sunset."
Monroe and Norris loved the grape's drinkability
and its light, peppery quality, so when they
founded Division Wine Co. in Portland, they
sought out gamay. Around the same time, another
Portland winery, Bow & Arrow, also began working
with the grape.
At the Elder Hall event, producers spoke of
gamay's ability to flourish in sites that might not
be suited to pinot noir, the state's flagship grape
variety. "This is from lower-elevation sandy soils,
where it's too warm to grow pinot," explained
Barbara Gross of Cooper Mountain as she
poured her robust, gently tannic gamay from the
biodynamically farmed Johnson School Vineyard.
The event was a long time coming for Myron
Redford, who first planted the grape in the
Willamette Valley's Eola Hills back in 1987. "I've

WINE & SPIRITS AUGUST 2017

been waiting thirty-nine years for this festival to
happen," he said. It was the Beaujolais-Villages
wine from Louis Jadot, popular on restaurant
lists in the '60s and '70s, that prompted him to
graft some gewurztraminer over to gamay in the
stony, windswept Seven Springs Vineyard. Back
then, said Redford, gamay was so unpopular that
he couldn't even get growers to plant it for him,
although he tried to talk up gamay as a potential
cash crop. "So it's an incredible, wonderful thing
to find young winemakers now making gamay," he
said. Given that the 22 producers pouring at I Love

Gamay were working with a mere eight Oregon
vineyards, it seems likely that more gamay will be
going into the ground soon. A few new plantings
are just coming online. Jubilee Vineyards in the
Eola-Amity Hills has some six-year-old gamay, and
Methven Family Vineyards recently grafted some
pinot gris over to gamay.
After the festival, growers and attendees
gathered for a dinner featuring aged gamays
from Oregon and Beaujolais. A 1990 Brouilly was
a standout, says Norris, and a 2000 Gamay Noir
from Brick House turned a few heads. But the
dinner wasn't really a "Judgment of Portland"-
just a chance to enjoy the nuances of gamay while
imagining its potential in Oregon. n

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - August 2017