Once a niche category led by a handful of pioneers, Oregon’s Champagne-style fizz is now scaling up—powered by shared production, deep technical know-how, and a new quality standard called Method Oregon.
Oregon’s Willamette Valley has long been respected for producing luscious Chardonnays and elegant Pinot Noirs, and is frequently compared to Burgundy for its cool climate, rolling hills, and latitude. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are also two of the key grapes in Champagne, but for many years, only a handful of wineries, including Argyle Winery, R. Stuart, and Soter Vineyards, made méthode champenoise sparkling wine on a commercial scale.
That’s all changing. Over the past decade, Willamette Valley winemakers have picked up their sabers in a traditional method sparkling wine revolution. New sparkling wine consortium Method Oregon estimates that Oregon wineries are now producing 150,000 cases of traditional method sparkling annually. That’s still a small number compared to other premier sparkling regions around the world, but production in Oregon has more than quadrupled over the past decade.
How Oregon Producers Are Making it Work
There are two major obstacles to making sparkling wine: It requires expensive, specialized equipment, and it is a much more technical process than producing still wine.
“There are so many barriers to entry into the sparkling wine industry,” says Method Oregon co-founder Jeanne Feldkamp of Corollary Wines, a new winery that produces sparkling wine exclusively. Method Oregon is a new collaborative effort among winemakers to elevate Oregon sparkling wine on the global stage and continue raising the bar on quality, responsible farming practices, and specificity of place. “On top of the intense competition, the regulatory complexity, and the multi-year production cycle, sparkling production at scale requires some eye-poppingly expensive equipment for riddling and disgorging, or a huge amount of labor.” To reduce the financial risk, Feldkamp turned to Andrew Davis and Radiant Sparkling Wine as a partner…