We spent a week in Portland, Oregon, a place of gorgeous pines and mountains—a landscape dramatic but also strangely soothing—with a strong and expertly brewed brand of coffee called Stumptown and with many bearded men dressed in slightly avant-garde clothing (the style falls somewhere between punk rock and logging camp). Residents we spoke with tended to sigh after Seattle as a more cosmopolitan town, and although our weather was superb they often alluded darkly to winter rains and oppressive cloud cover that made them suffer. But then who doesn’t think of happiness as something to be found elsewhere? We spend at least two minutes of any given day in Manhattan, the bustling center of the world, lamenting the fact that we’re there.
We had wine, too, abundantly and integrally linked to the economy and the life of the area. One lightly cool evening, we met a man who planted grapes out in the vineyards of Dundee Hills, and with him was a French girl who had been spending the summer as a vineyard intern. Somewhere in there is the story for a charming indie movie. Back in Manhattan, the only winemaker we know rents fermenting steel tanks out on Long Island: This seems to us to lack the same romance of the earth. On the other hand, this winemaker is destined to make money, and it’s amazing how much romance you can generate just by sprinkling in a dollar sign and some zeroes.
We were staying with a friend who, in a pleasantly dogged way, has managed to acquire several thousand bottles of Oregon wines, mostly reds, in the basement of his home. He was very generous with his wines—our first concern had been that he was hoarding for a postapocalyptic bomb cellar—and constantly reappeared with another bottle to open for us. We got a little woozy, to be honest. Or it may have been that we relaxed into the Pacific Northwest lifestyle. Our friend had planted bamboo along his patio, and we seemed to sway with the reeds.
What do we recall? A 1997 Argyle sparkling blanc de blanc from the Knudsen vineyards; a 1999 Argyle brut made from 30 percent pinor noir and 70 percent chardonnay—both crisp and pleasurable. Also two Panther Creeks, a 1999 pinot noir from the Bednarik vineyards and a 2000 pinot noit from the Red Hills Estate. Generally these were lovely wines, perhaps lacking in nuance. And the sparkling wines may have had the edge with us. But at the same time the pinots were lower-keyed than what we expect in wines from, oh, Californee. These weren’t overextracted blockbuster fruit bombs. They were of a piece with the hills saturated with blue and greens: Plush but without ostentation.
