Wine Enthusiast website
August 9, 2024
Michael Alberty
“Is the Willamette Valley the Next ‘It’ Region for High-Quality Sparklers?”
“Welcome to the Willamette Valley, where the quality of sparkling wine is high and aspirations are even higher. This renaissance, however, didn’t happen overnight.
Today, however, more people are making sparkling wine in the Willamette Valley than ever, undeterred by hard work and pain. These producers run the gamut from old hands like Argyle, Soter and ROCO, to young guns like Corollary, Arabilis and CHO.
When Davis left Argyle Winery to open Radiant in 2013, he estimated Oregon’s annual sparkling wine case production was approximately 31,000 cases, with Argyle responsible for almost all of that production. But there’s been an impressive swell of production in recent years. Data collected for the Oregon Wine Board by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research and Engagement reported that sparkling wine made up 3 to 5% of all case sales in 2022. That places Oregon sparkling wine sales between 171,000 and 285,000 cases that year, with the vast majority made in the Willamette Valley.
Those numbers, however, include bubble-filled wines made using various methods, from traditional to pétillant naturel.
To get a sense for the traditional method’s role in that growth, Davis says he had five clients when Radiant opened in 2013. Today, Radiant has 40 start-to-finish clients and produces approximately 45,000 cases annually. Argyle Winery in Dundee made 50,000 cases of traditional method wines in 2023, a hefty increase from 2013.