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Future Tense

A Space-Time Continuum

By Harry Peterson-Nedry

[Further thoughts to Twenty Years On, Fall 2006...]

OK, let the past alone. No matter how smart it was to begin the Oregon wine industry the way we did, where's it going?

Dynamic Tension

The future is not a simple extrapolation of the present. Issues at play serve to keep things up in the air, exciting in the flux, unnerving in the uncertainty. Our industry is an order of magnitude larger and more complex than when I joined and will likely be another order bigger and more important when I fade away. Will it be better or just bigger? How we react to these important issues will determine that.

Our industry's future success depends on our approach to the following key issues: the economy and marketplace, the environment, land use and the nature of local farming, the character of our industry (large versus small, competitive versus collaborative), the wines we make, our passions and principles, and our innovation.

Riesling Group Tasting

Friends Pushing the Envelope: Oregon is known as much for collaboration and collegiality as it is for Pinot Noir. They are especially essential for the future, as we blaze pioneering trails as shown in this industry Riesling group tasting from May 2004. These principles must be maintained.

Future Perfect

I have a dream where principles Oregonians hold dear, whether in the wine industry or as neighbors, aren’t compromised to grease business gears. Where bucolic scenes of vineyards, farms, and forests are valued enough by communities that houses don't insinuate themselves where tractors and trees ought to be. Where the green of our lands becomes a metaphor for how we operate, what we value, where tourists want to travel, how we measure our footprint, and what we want to leave our heirs. Where our wine is about the meal and our health; about what’s cool as well as hot, and white as well as red; about tradition and terroir not the writer du jour; and about staying Oregon and not becoming Napa. Where our children are as close and collaborative as we have been. Where who we are is more important than who we know or how much we earn.

Opportunities, Not Problems

How we adapt to challenging situations will define the industry in the medium term. Whether we talk of vineyard pests or diseases, such as phylloxera, bud mites, or botrytis, or of selecting closures that don’t taint our wines, how we look for solutions will either continue an inventive and technically varied fabric or begin a staid decision-making that seeks wisdom from accountancy.

There is a pattern of collaboration within this industry that approaches marketing as if we're hunting parties roaming out spears in hand or technical problems as if we're a huddle of teenagers under the hood of a Chevy. There is a magic to group activity that can't be lost to business-like mechanical rigor. Winery founders and principals can't delegate to hired guns, research institutes can't replace us clustering around an ailing grapevine, and marketing studies can never make as much sense as intuition driven by passion.

Economy & Marketplace

No matter how much we argue that we make wines we want to drink without regard to the marketplace, the market exerts a strong pull — one that could shift us to generic New World red styles or to abandon white wines as new wineries seek what's currently in vogue. Remember, white wines ruled at the beginning of the last century and white wines still pair best with most of the courses in our meals. An economy in recession can make us conservative, just to stay in business, while a robust economy can make us cocky and forget the concept of cycles seeking growth to fuel the American ideal of "more is better." It's never a question of "if" in economic cycles, but rather "when."

Today's general trends are encouraging, as baby boomers in the last bloom of life are well heeled and drinking wine, and as the new twenty-something millenials are showing signs of embracing wine with excitement and without pretension. Trophy hunting will stay viable for the boomers, while new, exciting, innovative wines and regions appeal to the millenials.

How wine is delivered to consumers promises tectonic shifts and upset. Shakeout of the Supreme Court Granholm decision is far from over, with numbing complexity and bureaucratic denials before widespread direct-shipping freedom is a reality. National distributors and mega wine companies continue to coalesce into monoliths big enough to seek member status in the EU, with all the efficiencies and constraints that size entails. A growing regional focus on tourism and eating locally, catalyzed by volatile energy costs and environmental concerns, might occur to shift everyday wine consumption closer to home. That said, special wines will always find special ways to get to special people.

Environment

Planet health is finally gaining momentum as all but the ossified see our climate changing, ice caps shrinking, public areas contaminated and overrun, oceans used as dumps, weather extremes reaching FEMA proportions, species of flora and fauna decimated, and energy sourcing proving politically radioactive. The wine industry's long-standing environmental priority is timely.

Organic farming, the green nature of plants' CO2 absorption, leadership in reuse and recycling, and hypersensitivity to climate-change impacts on what we grow in our cool climates will make Oregon wine the poster child for environmental stewardship. How we approach a branded Oregon Certified Sustainable emphasis, land use, conservation easements, processing and packaging materials selection, water conservation, shipping, wine country tourism, and other key green heritage issues will help set the standard for other wine regions and agricultural sectors.

Land Use & the Urban-Rural Dialogue

As modern society has moved away from the agrarian economy, through an era of hard industry, long since into the information age, to now rest in an outsourced lawn chair-and-Lexus economy, a disconnect has progressively separated consumers from producers. Few consumers now have more than an intellectual appreciation for how things are made or grown. This is apparent in how easily voters have recently given away farmland and the rights to farm to developers, as rural areas are ingested by cities. Farmland has become little more than land reserves for residential expansion.

Corral Creek Vineyards

Being Squeezed Out: Corral Creek Vineyards showing boundaries, with the wolf at the door, from Highway 99W at the point where a new bypass will take a slice of land (and our parking lot) to the proposed urban growth boundary for residential development at Corral Creek Road at the bottom. Help!

There needs to be a richer dialogue between these two dependent groups, lest farming with its other benefits to general welfare be outsourced to distant, warm, and commodity-like growing regions. Our local supporters and customers need to see more than field burning, slow combines on country roads, and crops as landscaping. Farmers have a role to play in educating, providing healthy foods in normal channels and at farmers' markets, and publicizing their contribution to a diversified and healthy economy. (The wine industry's annual contribution of $1.4 billion to the Oregon economy and $162 billion to the national economy, including significant exports, are worth honoring.) Our urban and rural needs coincide on issues such as immigration reform, which has to be resolved in the short term for both city and country well-being, not to mention fairness to a strongly contributing invisible sector of our society.

Besides a healthy economy and environment, we need lifestyles featuring healthy eating, drinking wine in moderation, and exercise. Many studies have shown this, and the future will add even more convincing data.

What We Plant, Where

There is an irony that at a time when regionality and place are showing their importance in more specific AVAs, tourism, and worldwide recognition of unique areas like the Willamette Valley, these places are physically changing. Thank climate change, or ignore it as your political leanings might dictate. What is not in question is that currently we are experiencing riper, more consistent vintages in the Willamette Valley. Not bad now.

But we can't hope to stop the change where we want it, so we'll have to begin to adapt. Adaptation is happening in several ways, from moving varieties like Pinot Noir to cooler sites higher in elevation, or cooler in aspect (e.g. north-facing, not south), or into new regions once unreasonably cool, like rain shadows or adjoining states. New, warmer weather varieties are being considered for our established viticultural areas, bringing the possibility of Syrah, Tempranillo, or Viognier into the Willamette Valley, while varieties with greater temperature tolerance, such as Riesling and Chardonnay, also gain more traction.

At Chehalem, our highest elevation site on Ribbon Ridge is seeing planting of Pinot Noir, Grüner Veltliner, and Riesling to honor an extraordinary cooler site and the need for keeping white wines in our mix. We bracket picking times to evaluate early picking strategies, while trying to develop coping mechanisms at the winery for very ripe fruit. Climate change at least requires adaptation. At best, we must work hard to change our lives. Chehalem is beginning a culture of environmental life-cycle analysis and a drive to innovate positive changes to the environment—changes we’ll talk about next time.

Integrity & the Rest of the Planet

The future I see will value old-style Oregon values and integrity even more than before. Truth in labeling, honest marketing, respect for other regions' wine place names, ingredient labeling, consumer advocacy, and the like, will be an Oregon flag unfurled. As worldwide political entities contemplate war strategies, I see the wine world coming together, as we collaborate on principles, compete on quality and value, and succeed with passion.

Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin

International Cooperation & Truth in Labeling: Competition on quality and value, but collaboration on fair rules in the marketplace will determine the future. Harry (seated, second from right) was the Oregon representative at a March 2007 conference in Washington D.C., welcoming more regions signing onto the Joint Declaration to Protect Wine Place & Origin, of which Oregon was a founding signator.