Oregon Wine Board Tour: Day 3

Room with a view: Southern Oregon Wine Institute lunch & tasting.

My plan to live blog yesterday didn’t go so well after leaving the beautiful town of Ashland. I had no service between Ashland and Roseburg, where we went to have lunch at Umpqua Community College’s Southern Oregon Wine Institute, and once we arrived for our tour of the Institute, my battery had less than 10% life…at that point my live blogging was done for the day.

From the incredible Southern Oregon Wine Institute, where we had lunch with three of Southern Oregon’s iconic winemakers (I’ll give you all the details in an upcoming post), we left and headed north to my hometown of Eugene where we had an amazing Pinot Gris tasting with King Estate and special guests and producing stars of Pinot Gris, Jesse Lange of Lange Estate and Jerry Murray of Van Duzer. We toasted with King Estate’s Blanc de Noir at the top of the vineyards before having an impressive, as usual, dinner in the beautiful King Estate Restaurant.

The Ranch at King Estate didn’t have enough rooms for our entire group, and the guys outnumbered the gals, so Deborah Grossman and I were driven out to a nearby Bed and Breakfast named Lanzarotta – such a totally cool place, I can’t wait to write about it.

Anyway, day 3 of the tour will take us back to King Estate bright and early for a Bakery and Charcuterie tour, and from there we head north again, to Willamette Valley Vineyards. I am super excited about our visit to Willamette Valley Vineyards. We’ll be focusing on Oregon Chardonnays, a varietal that I think my great state of Oregon has conquered and redefined, but has not yet received due recognition. We’ll have an instructed tasting of Oregon Chardonnay with Chardonnay superstars Robert Brittan of Brittan Vineyards, Jim Bernau of Willamette Valley Vineyards and Don Lange of Lange Estate.

From Willamette Valley Vineyards, we’ll head up to the Allison Inn and Spa in Newberg, where we’ll check in for the night. But before retiring for the evening, we will experience the much-talked-about cuisine at the Painted Lady Restaurant in Newberg while chatting with Oregon’s wine founders: Jason Lett of Eyrie Vineyards, Adam Campbell of Elk Cove Winery, Susan Sokol Blosser of Sokol Blosser Winery, and Dick Erath and Gary Horner of Erath Winery.

You know you’re an Oregon wine geek when….you get giddy about sharing a table with the pioneers of the incredible Oregon wine industry.

LIVE FROM THE ROAD

[liveblog]