“Forward and surprisingly fruity…round and ripe, very nicely balanced, and supported with bracing acidity. A remarkable effort for the vintage and the price.” ‘07 Illahe Pinot Noir -Wine Enthusiast
Earth Day Celebration
April 24th, 11am-5pm
Join Illahe along with Wildaire Cellars, and Genius Loci Wines for our annual earth day celebration. Three boutique wineries under one roof for one day only! We want to celebrate local businesses as well as sustainable farming techniques and handcrafted wines. We will have locally grown hazelnuts, local fresh baked bread, and grass fed beef from our neighbors at McKibben Ranch as well as artisan cheeses and local art work. More information coming soon…
We are open by appointment, call (503) 831-1248
Illahe Vineyards is pleased to be a featured winery at this years IPNC, July 24-26, 2010. Visit www.ipnc.org for more information.
Owner, Lowell Ford, first planted grapes in 1983 at our Glen Creek Vineyard in Salem. He was one of the first in Oregon to experiment with varietals like gruner veltliner and lagrein. In 2000, Lowell bought the 80-acre Illahe Vineyard, which was a pasture at the time. Though its main production is pinot noir, his love of white wine and experimentation ensured that its future will always include a broad view of world wine grape production and not simply copy a Burgundian domaine.
In the 1990s, Lowell spearheaded the development of the Northwest Viticulture Center at Chemeketa where he worked as the Dean of Students. Lowell is still on the board of directors at the Viticulture Center and a lifetime donor.
ILLAHE is a local word that has been used to describe “land” for centuries in Oregon and the Northwest. The Chinook Jargon word appears from Canada to California, sometimes meaning “earth” or “place” or “soil.” It is comparable to the French word terroir, and, in a sense, is the Northwest’s word for terroir.
At Illahe, our goal is to make wine as naturally as possible from the soil to bottle. This requires working by hand on small lots with age-old processing techniques:
• Hand picking
• Immediate delivery to the winery in buckets, not totes
• Sorting in the vineyard and at the winery
• Gravity-feed processing
• Native fermentations
• Moving pomace to the press by hand to remove bitter seeds and lees
• Gentle pressing in a basket press
• 100% barrel storage for reds
Our winemaking style thus precludes what many other wineries use to manipulate the product, such as enzyme additions, tannin additions, concentrators, or red wine filtration. We clean thoroughly and monitor the wines closely in barrel. We work on the wine of the vintage, not a homogenized product. In the vineyard, we have the same approach, using as much full-time, experienced vineyard help as possible. We use draft horses to mitigate our use of diesel, and spray as little as possible. We use solar power to offset our energy use, and store and filter rainwater to ease our impact on the aquifer. The result is a beautiful and pure wine both on its own and with your favorite dishes.
Our tasting room and production facility, designed by Laurence Ferar and Associates of Portland, is just now being filled with the wines that will define the vineyard and the region. Be a part of wine history in the making.
Read Our Blog the “Soil Spectator”
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