Two Tenths of a Point

In 1965 David Lett planted pinot noir in the Willamette Valley in Oregon.

The accepted view at the time was that this was a mistake. American wine happened in California, where it was warm and the grapes ripened. Oregon was cold and wet, the season was short, and the rain arrived in autumn exactly when you did not want it.

All of that was correct. It was also the point.

Pinot noir does not want an easy climate. Given heat and reliability it makes soft, broad, agreeable wine that tastes of fruit and very little else. What it needs is a place where ripening is genuinely in doubt every year, where the grower is anxious in August and the harvest decision actually matters. Lett was not tolerating the marginality of the Willamette. He had worked out that it was the necessary condition.

Then the tastings, which are famous and usually told badly.

At the Gault-Millau Wine Olympics in Paris in 1979, Lett's Eyrie 1975 South Block placed among the leading pinot noirs in a blind field full of Burgundy. That result could have been an accident of a particular flight on a particular afternoon, and plenty of people said so.

What happened next is the interesting part.

Robert Drouhin, a Burgundian of some standing, organised a rematch in 1980 on his own terms to check the result.

The Eyrie 1975 came second. It was beaten by Drouhin's own Chambolle-Musigny 1959 by two tenths of a point.

Think about the conditions. A sceptical Burgundian, running the tasting himself, with a great vintage of a great wine from his own cellar, and a fourteen-year-old Oregon wine from a valley nobody had heard of finished within a rounding error of it.

And then Drouhin did the thing that actually settles the argument. In 1987 he bought land in the Dundee Hills and founded Domaine Drouhin Oregon.

That is worth more than any tasting score. A house with centuries of accumulated judgement about where pinot noir grows well looked at the result, and instead of disputing it, went and bought some of the ground.

The reading that has stuck, that this was a French humiliation, is the least interesting one available. Nobody was humiliated. A Burgundy won. The margin was smaller than the difference between two vintages of either wine, which is the genuinely notable fact, and the response of the losing side's most senior participant was to invest.

What Oregon and Burgundy share is not geology. The rock is quite different. What they share is latitude, marginality, and the same annual question about whether the fruit is going to get there at all.

Hold that in mind for two chapters, because it recurs in every region that has succeeded with this grape, and it is the single strongest clue in the entire experiment.