Véronique Drouhin-Boss on Pinot Noir in Burgundy and Oregon

by Véronique Drouhin-Boss

Pinot Noir! I am lucky to have the opportunity to make wine in both Burgundy and Oregon, two very different but very special places for Pinot Noir. People often ask about comparing wines from both regions, but the discussion is very short if you don’t consider everything else, including the climate, the soil, the vineyards, and the growing season. And in the end, I am fascinated by the similarities as much as the differences. It’s impossible to generalize.

Winemaker Véronique Drouhin-Boss (photo: Domain Drouhin Oregon)

My great-grandfather, Joseph Drouhin, started our family business in 1880, and it was his son, Maurice Drouhin, who began to buy beautiful vineyards in Burgundy, starting with Clos des Mouches.  He was a strong voice for terroir who urged his fellow Burgundians to express their sites honestly and authentically: to celebrate what the monks had begun to define nearly 1000 years earlier.

In the 1960s, my father Robert Drouhin also began to buy vineyards in Burgundy when possible and, in 1987, he also bought land in the Dundee Hills of Oregon. He had already visited the region many times and had tasted several very interesting wines, so he knew that the potential to make excellent wine existed in Oregon. As important, I think, he very much liked the spirit of the Oregon vintners embodied by people like David Lett and David Adelsheim, who would became dear friends.

As a winemaker and carrier of the family tradition, I have spent most of my adult life traveling between these two beautiful places, learning something every day, every year. When we built the winery in Oregon, we replicated much of what one would find at our winery in Beaune, France. The main difference is that in Oregon we had the ability to build on a hillside, which allowed us to create an elegant, efficient gravity-flow system, something that Pinot Noir likes very much.

All of this leads me back to the climate, the soil, the vineyard and the growing season. Though Burgundy and the Willamette Valley are on the same parallel, they do not share weather patterns often.  In fact, Oregon is dry and warm for most of the summer, while Burgundy has frequent rain and sometimes bouts of hail. Although there are occasionally years like 2003, which was warm all over the world, that is not so common. Also, the soils are quite different. In Burgundy, you find chalky, sometimes sandy limestone soils, while in the Dundee Hills, volcanic, iron-rich soils are common. Within these broad descriptions, there are many layers to discover.

Domaine Drouhin's winery in Oregon's Willamette Valley (photo: Domain Drouhin Oregon)

My brother Philippe manages the estate vineyards in Burgundy and Oregon, and he is rightly obsessed with quality. In Burgundy, we naturally follow the high-density template and all estate vineyards are certified organic. We have also planted in a high-density manner in Oregon, which was something new for the region when we started working here. Our Oregon vineyards are LIVE-certified as is our Oregon winery.  In a family business now in its 4th-generation, you often think about what you are leaving for your children and grandchildren.

For my family, balance, elegance, and finesse are the goals we set for our wines, whether in Burgundy or Oregon. But the final measure is typicity: how true we are to the growing region. Just as someone might stick their nose in a glass of Chambolle-Musigny and say, “it could only come from Chambolle-Musigny,” we hope that people now or one day will stick their noses into a glass of our cuvée Laurène and say, “it could only come from Oregon.”

What’s LIVE-certified?

LIVE is a non-profit organization providing education and independent 3rd-party certification for vineyards and wineries using international standards of sustainable viticulture and enology practices in wine-grape and wine production. www.liveinc.org

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[Véronique Drouhin-Boss continues her family's tradition of winemaking both in New World Oregon and in Old World Burgundy. Every year, she essentially runs two marathons of harvest, first in France and then in the US.]