Breezy Slope Vineyard

Breezy Slope Vineyard sits on the eastern edge of the Walla Walla Valley AVA, just as the rolling hills of the Palouse meet the foothills of the Blue Mountains. The site is distinguished by its altitude (about 1700 feet), its extraordinary air movement, and the underlying hydrology of the soils that have washed down the steep hillside. Breezy slope isn’t exactly a cool site—for most of the growing season, air temperatures are about the same as those on the valley floor—but the combination of slightly less daily sun exposure, good water holding capacity in the soils, and moderate wind stress, seems to keep ripening a few weeks behind the closest vineyards on the valley floor, preserve fresh acidity, and keep tannin levels from the heights they sometimes achieve in other Walla Walla growing areas. This combination of factors has helped Jack DeWitt’s somewhat unlikely decision to plant mostly Pinot Noir throughout the early 2000s to pay off, even though Pinot Noir is best known for quality in cooler wine regions.

I was initially drawn to Breezy Slope for the small block of Pinot Gris. There has not been enough of this fruit available yet for me to make a 100% Pinot Gris wine, but I have cofermented the Breezy Slope Pinot Gris for the last several years with Pinot Noir from the neighboring block to make the Marginalia Light Red Wine. Given the results and the reception this wine has received, I’m not sure I’ll ever find out what the Pinot Gris tastes like on its own…. This wine has become, I think it is fair to say, the foundation of Marginalia. It is light-bodied but intensely flavored, structured by acid more than tannin, with enough tannin for complexity but not so much that the wine is angular or drying. In my way of thinking, this is a style of wine that really highlights the distinctive potential of the eastern foothills area of the Walla Walla AVA.

I also worked with the Nebbiolo block (really a mixture of Nebbiolo and Syrah) in the last year before it was replanted to 100% Syrah. If I had started the winery a few years earlier, I might have been able to take this whole block under contract, but my timing was just a couple years off. The resulting wine, an acid-structured and refreshing red, is still available in distribution channels. Though I can’t make exactly this wine again, this small experimental lot became the stylistic foundation of the red wine program I have planned for the next several years, where I’m aiming to produce simple, perhaps slightly rustic, fruit-forward, acid-structured wines with a low impact from aging with native Oregon white oak (Quercus Garryana).