465: Ken Wright Went Looking for Aroma

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

Levi Dalton

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4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2019

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ken Wright is the founder and winemaker of Ken Wright Cellars, based in Carlton, Oregon.

Ken discusses his work with Dick Graff in the 1970s, and then explains why he decided to move from California to Oregon in the 1980s to pursue winemaking in Oregon. He gives a thorough explanation of the different rock types found in state, and the attributes that different sites bring to a resulting wine. He also goes into depth in explaining his own winemaking evolution, from working at Panther Creek, to starting Ken Wright Cellars in 1994. Along the way, Ken makes several connections between the winemaking and the farming, and explains how one is often the result of the other. In particular, he talks quite a bit about the phenomenon of reduction in a wine, something he tries to prevent. Ken further describes several key vintages for Oregon Pinot Noir, discussing the attributes of those years and their impact on his own thinking.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.
0:05.1	I'm Levy Dalton.
0:06.1	I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Can Ken Wright of Ken Wright Sellers and Oregon. He's both the founder and the
0:28.1	winemaker there. Hello sir, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you.
0:30.8	It's very nice to see you. So in the late 70s you were working in
0:34.7	wine in California. I did. I started in 78 in Monery County working for a company
0:40.9	called Ventana. Additionally, at the Ventana facility, I was making wines for Chalone.
0:48.0	Dick Graf would have been around?
0:49.0	Absolutely. Dick Graf was around and the Chalone wines at the time, it would be easy to say that they may have been the best wine being made in the United States.
1:00.0	There were phenomenal wines. Dick was greatly a part of that. He had an unbelievable passion for winemaking, for excellence, for quality, and he conveyed that to everyone he was around
1:16.0	But I was so fortunate because he formed at the time I was there a
1:20.0	research group that met at Mount Eden in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
1:25.8	It's a research group that included Stephen Kistler from Sonoma,
1:31.1	Rick Foreman from Napa, Josh Jensen and Steve Dorner from Calera, Larry Brooks from
1:37.5	Acacia, Rich Sanford from Santa Barbara. It was an amazing group of people, including all the Shalone properties.
1:47.0	And I got to be part of it because I was making these wines, for them, the Gavlin wine.
1:52.0	I had a chance to sit in,
1:54.0	and it was pretty heady stuff,
1:57.0	experimenting both in the vineyard and the winery.
2:00.0	So I was wise enough at the time to keep my mouth shut,
2:02.0	and my ears open.
2:05.0	One of the things Dick Graf really wanted to focus in on early was French barrels for white wine, right?
	...

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