The pinot noir wines of Oregon’s Willamette Valley are delicious, delightfully varied, and expensive. Can fine wines, an amenity of the affluent, save wild salmon and lead the way to sustainable agriculture for the middle class?
Pinot noir grapes thrive in cool, moist regions, and are perfectly suited for the northern Willamette Valley, southwest of Portland. Several hundred small, mostly family-owned vineyards and wineries are found on the rolling hills of Yamhill County and neighboring areas. A single winding country road may have several wineries along it, and there are dozens of country roads climbing these hills.
On a recent wine-tasting visit, my husband and I visited Winter’s Hill, White Rose, and several other wineries in the Dundee Hills. The White Rose’s hilltop tasting room overlooked a vineyard whose grape leaves had turned a light gold. A crew was harvesting the last grapes of the season. The room itself had been built with lumber from logs salvaged after a forest fire; the boards had a slightly burnt, smoky scent, a good complement to the rich pinot noir wines being served.
As we sipped the wines, educating our noses and taste buds to distinguish the subtle hints of marionberry or oak or leather in the different wines, we learned that this small corner of Oregon was divided into six American Viticultural Areas (AVAs). We were in the Dundee Hills AVA; the Yamhill-Carlton, Ribbon Ridge, and Chehalem Mountains AVAs were nearby, and two other AVAs were south of us. Rocks, soils, elevation, and small climate variations distinguish one AVA from another. Wine connoisseurs, whose palates are more finely developed than mine, can smell and taste subtle flavor differences that distinguish the wines of one AVA from the next.
The importance of unique, local characteristics for defining AVAs in the world of wine seem, to me, to be similar to the importance of unique, local characteristics for defining the habitat areas of wild Pacific salmon. Wild Pacific salmon stocks are each uniquely adapted to the special characteristics of the watersheds they inhabit. Oregon Coast Range coho salmon have a different life history, and genetic differences, from Puget Sound coho salmon. McKenzie River spring chinook salmon are distinct from Columbia River spring chinook, and so on. Each salmon stock is adapted to the waters, soils, and climate variations of its watershed, the freshwater streams where adult salmon return to spawn, navigating their way by sense of smell and taste. Both salmon and wine lovers use their sense of smell to detect the subtle individual differences that distinguish one locality from another.
But unlike wine lovers, many wild Pacific salmon stocks are listed as threatened or endangered species, in part because their freshwater home streams have been degraded into poor salmon habitat. A few years ago, Pacific Rivers Council started their SalmonSafe program, thinking that wine connoisseurs in the Pacific Northwest, who pride themselves on being green, might also want to protect salmon habitat—some of which is in the AVAs where wine grapes are grown.
SalmonSafe is a certification program for agricultural products. For a vineyard to get certified, the owners have to do things like plant riparian trees, plant cover crops to reduce erosion into streams, and use natural pest control to minimize pesticide runoff into streams. Owners say the program is rigorous, but when they are certified, they get to add the SalmonSafe designation to the labels on their wine bottles.
The idea was that SalmonSafe certification would become a selling point that knowledgeable consumers would look for, much like organic food labels. Who would be more knowledgeable and discriminating than wine lovers, who can tell the difference between wines from grapes grown on Ribbon Ridge and wines from grapes grown in the nearby Chehalem Mountains? The program was successful and eventually spun off to become a nonprofit on its own.
Can the SalmonSafe program be used more widely to influence agriculture on the West Coast? Or is getting the certification too expensive, and doomed to be limited to specialty products for foodies and wine lovers? The wines of the Dundee Hills were delicious, but most sold at prices from $40 to $70 a bottle. My husband and I enjoyed the $10 tasting flights, which typically offered four wine varieties per flight, but we bought only a few wines that were under $20 a bottle. Even that amount was more than we usually spend on table wine. So far the SalmonSafe program has succeeded mostly with specialty agricultural products like fine wines and artisanal cheeses; the bins of lettuce, carrots, and celery in supermarkets have no SalmonSafe labels.
Even for the foodie market, the SalmonSafe label has an unwritten clause that salmon safety, after all, only goes so far. At fine restaurants such as the Joel Palmer House, in Dayton near the Dundee Hills, SalmonSafe wines can be ordered with a wild salmon dinner, the fillet deliciously grilled and expertly sauced.
