Gran Moraine Winery

Oregon Wine Country, an extraordinary place sculpted by the floods of the last ice age, is a series of valleys much like Burgundy. The Yamhill Carlton AVA, located in the northern Willamette Valley, consists of ancient marine sedimentary-based soils, Mediterranean weather patterns and neatly combed benchlands. Gran Moraine embodies the confluence of these elements, creating a perfect setting to craft classic Burgundian varieties – Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The purest, intense, and expressive fruit is grown in places that barely ripen a crop. This is a result of the fruit maturing in cooler temperatures, which helps preserve flavours and acidity. In temperate climates, ripening occurs under the waning hours of autumn days, as well as the duress of imminent season-ending frost. Gran Moraine’s vineyards in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA of Oregon allow the Burgundian varieties Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to achieve ripeness under these ideal conditions. The climate of the Yamhill-Carlton AVA combined with the sedimentary rock-based soils of our growing sites produces wines with nuanced fruit and earth characters driven by ageable tannins that are structured yet elegant when young. The fruit is picked at a point thought to best express the profoundness of both the site and the vintage. After hand harvesting, it is brought at most a mere 15-minute drive to our winery. At the winery, the fruit is hand sorted before careful processing in which our Pinot Noir is fed by gravity into open-topped tanks. Depending on the vintage, block, and clone, the fruit is left for a cold maceration period of three to eight days. During fermentation, we use punch-downs as our primary method of cap management. At the end of alcoholic fermentation, the wine is racked to 100 per cent French oak barrels for maturation and slowly undergoes natural malolactic fermentation.