International Pinot Noir Celebration, part I

The blog has been on something of a hiatus lately due to major life events i.e. moving to the US at long last! I arrived on 16 June (or June 16, as they say over here) and have been acclimatising since then.

Now that I’ve moved, my wine drinking patterns have changed somewhat and the good stuff is likely to be in concentrated bursts of activity. Fortunately, there have been two such bursts in the last few weeks: the International Pinot Noir Celebration at the end of July, and a trip to the Finger Lakes in early August. It will probably take several posts to cover them all.

Starting with the IPNC, this has been going since 1986 and is held in Oregon, in the town of McMinnville which is about an hour away from Portland. This was the furthest west I’ve ever been! It turned out to be an excellent introduction to Oregon pinot noir. There were also a few producers from other places such as California, France, New Zealand and Austria.

I met up successfully with G and H at Portland airport on Thursday evening and we got a car to our student apartment in McMinnville where our wine friend D from upstate New York was waiting for us. This turned out to be the perfect accommodation as it was within walking distance of all the activities. The only weird thing was the height of the beds, which were about four feet off the ground with no ladder – presumably aimed at athletic young men. I ended up putting my mattress on the floor which solved the problem.

We had pizza delivered and I’d picked up a couple of wines at the airport to get things rolling. One of these had appeared to be a tempranillo when I saw it in the shop, but on closer inspection it was a tempranillo / riesling blend, which I think it’s fair to say was not entirely successful. Described on that website as “a fun combination of grapes one wouldn’t expect to find in Oregon” – hmmmm! I will learn to check the label more closely in future. Fortunately the other bottle, a pinot, was drinkable so all was not lost.

On the Friday morning, we had an amazing buffet breakfast on the lawn with some particularly wonderful raspberries and apricots. The opening ceremony consisted of an elderly celebrity couple giving a quick speech in praise of pinot noir, including a memorable quote along the lines of how the first time you taste it, it's like your head leaves your body and then reattaches in a slightly different way. This was followed by a long parade of people from the various wineries, which took some time to get through.

One noticeable thing for me, attending for the first time, was how everyone assumed that one already had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Oregon AVAs. I hadn’t even encountered the term AVA before but someone at our table explained to me that it stands for American Viticultural Area and is a bit like an appellation in Burgundy. It would probably have been helpful to have a map of how they all related to each other, but the info for the festival was all on a mobile phone app and I don't think this was included. Serves me right for not doing any homework, I guess. 

After breakfast, it was into the coach for a vineyard tour… More to follow!