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Oregon’s Enduring Spirit of Collaboration

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Robed in luxurious, perpetual green, Oregon’s largest AVA is home to more than 270 wineries and over 1,000 vineyards. It’s a region that has enjoyed marked growth over the past few decades thanks, in part, to a handful of families that arrived in the late 1960s with little more than determination and vision.

“My father always loved manual labor and farming; he had a deep connection to the land,” Alison Sokol Blosser confided. She’s now co-president of Sokol Blosser, a position she shares with her brother, Alex. She recently took time out of her busy schedule to give us a glimpse into what it was like to grow up in Oregon’s then-emerging wine industry.

“My parents were history majors; they met at Stanford. Neither of them came from a farming or winemaking background, but they did have this crazy notion of wanting to work the land, doing something with wine and food culture.”

Alison’s parents arrived in Oregon in 1970 and settled on a 5-arce parcel that had been home to a senescent prune orchard. “It started as a hobby, and for the first few years, we sold the grapes. Later, with encouragement from my grandfather, we decided to build a family winery. The Lett’s were just down the road, and the Ponzi’s weren’t too far away. It started with a handful of people; everybody had day jobs, everybody came together to figure out how to trellis, how to deal with mildew. We shared equipment.”

It was this generosity of spirit that laid the foundation for the Oregon wine industry. Collaboration is not unique to Oregon; one can find it in California and in Washington State, too. The difference perhaps is the degree to which these families worked and weathered vintages together, or as Domaine Drouhin’s Managing Director, David Millman so succinctly put it, “What connects us is our common quest for excellence.”

You can download a PDF of the full article or browse to read it online in The Somm Journal’s October-November 2016 edition.

CHRISTINE HAVENS
McMinnville, OR