Ken Wright Cellars
Ken
Wright:
Pursuing the Pure Expression
of Oregon Pinot noir
by Cole Danehower
Talking to Ken Wright, one could easily get the feeling that there is
very little he doesn't know about grape growing and winemaking.
His conversation ranges authoritatively over such
diverse subjects as: plant botany and its implications on the production
of phenols in wine,
geologic history and soil classifications and their impact on flavors
in wine, how vacuum extraction technology can remove excess water from
grape juice without impacting quality, the pluses and minuses of soil
amendments in encouraging microbial life, and the economics of acreage
contracts and the resultant win-win scenario for grower and winemaker.
Which is not to say that Ken Wright is a
know-it-all-quite the contrary! Equally common in his conversation
are phrases like: "I don't know," "we're
experimenting to try and find out," and "you'd have to ask
an expert about that."
What definitely can be said about Ken Wright, is that he is passionate
about his vines and his wines, and that he has an abiding thirst for
any tidbit of knowledge that will help him produce wines that better
express their site.

Processing Fruit at Ken Wright Cellars
Letting
the Fruit Express Itself For Ken, the drama of wine revolves around
working with nature to facilitate the expression of fruit and place
in a glass. "Human beings are
not responsible for the qualities we enjoy in wine," he says, "the
qualities that the fruit possesses are inherent-we don't inject them
into the berries."
But, he goes on, "we can get in the way." Ken believes, then,
that "the grower's and winemaker's true job is to learn how to be
an aid in helping the fruit get to where it wants to go, on its own." He
views his role as "simply to try and have the purest expression
that the fruit is capable of, brought all the way to the bottle and evident
in a glass of wine."
Given this philosophy, it is no mystery why
Ken works so extensively with Pinot noir. "Pinot noir has a far greater ability than any
other variety to express the qualities of place-and that's magical! Our
whole goal with this winery," he declares, "is to find great
sites and work with each site to try and find out what we can do to help
that fruit best express itself."
To help achieve this goal, Ken and his staff concentrate on two fundamentals:
site specific vineyard management-to get the healthiest and ripest fruit
possible; and winemaking integrity-to capture and bring out the most
powerful expression of the fruit.
Buy Fruit by the Acre, not the Pound Early in his Oregon career, Ken realized that one of the keys to producing
better fruit was managing crop yields in the vineyard. Even at 3 tons
per acre-a crop level considered low in the late 1980s-he noticed that
in those vintages where flowering hadn't gone as well and the vines carried
a naturally smaller crop, the grapes ripened sooner.
"It became apparent," he recalls, "that
whatever we could do to influence having the fruit as ripe as possible,
as soon as possible,
was a critical element of being successful in Oregon. My realization
was that if we got down to yields of around 2- to 2.25-tons per acre,
we had a greater chance of being successful far more years than not."
Accomplishing this in the late 1980s was difficult. Ken didn't then
own or lease any vineyard property and worked exclusively with purchased
grapes-from growers who were traditionally paid by the ton.
To gain control over the crop yield, Ken
helped introduce a new business concept: acreage contracts. By paying
growers a full price for a full
crop per acre, Ken could gain control over how the vines were managed,
and could crop them to his desired, small yields. It was far more expensive,
but it delivered higher quality fruit and, says Ken "was really
worth it" to do.
"With acreage contracts we created a partnership with the grower," explains
Ken. "It gave the grower consistency of income so they could start
looking at longer term investments in their vineyard, and it gave us
the right to reduce crop to whatever we wished."
The introduction of acreage contracts in 1988, believes Ken, helped
start a process of elevating the quality of Oregon's fruit, and ultimately
wine.
"Since then," he says, "I
think what's happened, especially in the last 4-5 years, has been a
greater focus on canopy management-trying
to most efficiently capture light in the vineyard-because light, pure
and simple, is sugar."
Drop Fruit and Manage Canopy
In the vineyard, Ken essentially spares no expense to accomplish two
things: keep the crop size very low to reduce the load on the vine,
and create as big an engine for the creation of sugar as possible. "You
want a lot of power," he explains, "and that means efficient
leaf surface to capture more light, and little fruit weight to bog
down the vine." The result, he says is that the fruit will
ripen faster. "You'll
be in the barn with dry, fully ripened fruit while others with larger
crop loads will still be out there hanging in the wind . . . or rain."
To this end, Ken and his crew do extensive shoot thinning, pinning,
and placement in the vineyard. He and his crew go each vine in each vineyard
and, by hand, reduce the number of young vine shoots, place them for
optimum sun exposure, and pin them on the trellis to grow in a way that
prevents leaf shading-which reduces light capture.
"We want all the leaves capturing light," he says, "so
we start off by creating the best framework for the plant to generate
sugar. It's a huge amount of work it's extremely expensive, but it really
pays off-you may gain 4 or 5 days of ripening-and ultimately the fruit
seems more intense."
Dropping fruit is another place where Ken is innovating. Traditionally,
excessive fruit is cut from the vine at the point in the growing season
when color changes. But Ken, in association with other wineries and vineyards,
has been experimenting with dropping fruit as early as possible, so the
vine doesn't put any extra energy into growing fruit that ultimately
would be cut away.
So far results of tests indicate that thinning fruit within a certain
early window of time seems to result in earlier maturing of tannins.
That means riper fruit, with less green tannins at harvest.
Of course, the vineyard isn't the only place where better practices
result in better wine. Ken pays equal attention to his winemaking.

Grapes
and barrels, ready to make wine, Ken Wright Cellars The Winemaking "When you've gone through the whole season in the vineyard spending
a lot of money to harvest perfectly ripe fruit," he says, "to
do anything less than making sure that nothing but that high quality
fruit gets in your fermenter, to me is insane."
Consequently, Ken was one of the first to
make hand sorting of fruit standard practice. "You just can't sort it all in the field," he
explains. "You have to get it in on a conveyer under good lighting
and you have to sort out everything that isn't perfectly ripe fruit."
A sorting crew, usually of ten people, goes
over every bin that arrives from the field, picking out bugs, twigs,
rot, leaves-anything that would
harm the ultimate wine-before the fruit goes to the destemmer. "It's
astounding how much we throw away-it makes a big difference."
Another process innovation that Ken pioneered was cold soaking the fruit
before fermentation to extract character. It used to be that winemakers,
if they did any maceration* at all, did it after fermentation, when alcohol
was present. Ken wasn't satisfied with this method.
"By doing the cold soak on the front end, without alcohol, just
juice, you can get all the color you want, all the aroma and flavor you
want, but because no alcohol is present you do not break down seed tannin
and you don't get a lot of bitter compounds that compromise mouth feel," explains
Ken. Today, cold soaking Pinot noir before fermentation is common.
The Vineyards In keeping to his goal of finding great sites with which to make expressive
wines, Ken Wright has helped popularize the concept of single vineyard
designations in Oregon. So, for instance, in 2000 Ken Wright Cellars
will release Pinot noirs from 12 different Oregon vineyards-and each
will be a very different wine with its own distinct character.
"Each site is different," he explains. "You
need to walk into a site as if it were a fresh canvas and be observant
and open to
what you sense in the behavior of the vines and the qualities of the
wine. If you do that, then you will begin to understand what might be
a proper direction for you to help these vines be healthier and more
expressive."
Another step in that process is paying attention
to the soil and its characteristics. "What's below ground is terribly important," he
says. "We think it has everything to do with the qualities of the
wines."
Assuming a healthy microbial life in the soil (as you would expect,
an area where Ken is doing a lot of-if you'll excuse the expression-groundbreaking
work), Ken is looking for vine roots to grow deep enough to contact the
bedrock.
Over time, he says, "you're waiting
for a vineyard to reach a point where the roots are in contact with
the mother rock. Then the root system
is going to have an opportunity to pull that mineral up into the vine-this
is where we see vineyards achieve clarity of expression; they seem to
blossom."
The Soils Ken is working with vineyards that provide
him a variety of site expressions. "We
have basically two simple forms of soil in our area: you are either sedimentary
or you are volcanic. These two soil types really define the basic qualities
of our wine."
The vineyards Ken works with in the Dundee
Hills (Abbey Ridge, Arcus, Nysa) are on deep clay-rich volcanic soils.
Ken feels these sites deliver
fruit that is "very focused, light-to-medium red fruits generally;
you tend to get a lot of raspberry, lighter cherry, strawberry."
In the Eola Hills, his vineyards (Canary
Hill, Carter, Elton) are on shallower volcanic soils with less clay.
Here the "fruits are quite
a bit darker; you have a lot of cassis, plum, blackberry, blueberry."
In the Yamhill Foothills (Guadalupe, McCrone,
Shea, Wahle, Whistling Ridge) and the Coast Range (Freedom Hill), the
vineyards are on sedimentary
soils. "In these areas you get a lot more spice; more anise, a lot
of dark chocolate, cedar, freshly turned earth-a lot of fruit, but they
aren't simply focused on the fruit."
It's All About the Fruit By now, though, it should be clear that Ken is, simply focused on the
fruit. Everything that he does-including many things not described here-whether
it is in testing the soil for chemical composition, or in finding innovative
ways to clean barrels prior to filling, is done to improve the quality
of the wine.
"I don't know how people view us outside of this winery; I really
have no idea-people will tell you anything. All I can do is know what
it means to me," he says. "When you have a great site and you're
successful in staying out of the way-assuming a high level of quality
work-and you allow the expression that came out of the fruit to be in
the glass . . . then anyone tasting that wine senses it-and that is the
magic of wine."
"Wine is a gift," concludes Ken, "a
wonderful gift of nature that we can enjoy. It offers a simple but
very interesting pleasure
in our lives; it's no more than that, but it is wonderful for that!"
-----------------------------
Ken Wright Cellars makes consistently excellent Pinot Noir, Chardonnay,
and Pinot Blanc at the winery in Carlton, Oregon. Known for careful
blending of cuvees from small single vineyard sites, Ken Wright Cellars
produces rich, sophisticated, elegant wines that are sold out a year
before they are released.
Ken Wright Cellars operates out of an 8400
square foot facility, a sign of the success of their wines. Current production
levels
are at
10,000 cases of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Blanc. All wines are
vineyard designated, made with careful attention to vineyard management.
Isn't it remarkable that this winery has developed a national and international
reputation for Pinot Noir given that the total vineyard acreage from
which they purchase grapes is only 50 acres!
Ken Wright and his associates select vineyard sites that they then personally
supervise, culminating in a three week period during harvest when they
seem to stay up 24 hours a day, cell phones to ears, running from site
to site, watching for just the right moment to harvest. Then, as Ken
puts it, he tries to stay out of the way of the wine, and let it become
what it is meant to be.
Ken Wright Cellars has made sites such as Canary Hill, Croft, Guadalupe,
and Youngberg famous for the wines the winery has made from them. Currently,
Ken Wright Cellars makes wines from over ten different small plots, and
has purchased land and planted vineyards of his own.
Ken Wright Cellars was founded in 1993, and its first vintage was produced
in 1994. Previous to founding Ken Wright Cellars, Ken Wright founded
Panther Creek Winery in 1986 and made wines there from 1986 through 1994.
In 1993 Panther Creek was purchased by Ron and Linda Kaplan, the current
owners.Ken Wright Cellars' first building was an old brick building,
a former glove factory, which the winery shared with Domaine Serene Winery.
The1993 through 1996 vintages of Domaine Serene wines were made by Ken
Wright Cellars for Domaine Serene.
#########################
Tyrus Evan
Ken
Wright Cellars' label for non-Burgundian wines made by Ken Wright from
Washington and Oregon fruit.
|