It’s been a worrisome last few weeks. Scott’s been out and about with our wine, to select, highly esteemed Portland, Oregon restaurants and sommeliers who we felt would appreciate the obvious uniqueness of our wines. And now we seem to be at a standstill. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: our wines are so atypical for this local area and the current collective state of this industry, people don’t know what to do with them. How atypical you ask? Well, for one, they have tannins (gasp!). For another, they are well-structured, angular, some might say, with very distinct flavours, and they’re all 13.5% alcohol and under, ACTUAL, not fudged, numbers. These are wines that were made in our vineyard, the grapes carefully tended to and watched for the right picking time. Our wines are both elegant and robust, and individual beyond all get-out. These wines were made with a very clear vision, and it shows. And people don’t expect it, and don’t know what to think about it.
Really, how does one go about finding people who value individual wines? We’ve got to get more creative here. It’s obvious the wine industry is on the cusp of returning to more singular wines, personal wines, like ours. We’re seeing more and more how people who either lack or lost vision (like Kluge and Cosentino) are shaking out, little by little. We’re reading how over-ripe wines are trending downward. We feel in our gut the yearning for the “authentic” and real in all walks of life, not just wine, a return to a simpler moment that brings pause and reflection, instead of this non-stop go-go-going. BUT WHERE ARE THESE PEOPLE? WHERE ARE YOU?! I just hope we’re not too much before our time. But it’s starting to feel very lonely, and I’m not even out on our hilltop.
So that’s what we’re finding ourselves up against. Maybe we just need to stay away from these Portland bastion restaurants and try with the new, young, more experimental places; it seems the big guys have a system that works and they don’t want to introduce anything new to it. And that makes me gasp, for when one no longer values the distinct and individual, what is there left?
