While it doesn’t enjoy the profile of Willamette Valley’s renowned Pinot Noir or rising star Chardonnay, Pinot Gris remains an important wine for the region’s growers and producers. The acknowledged founding father of Willamette Valley, the late David Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards, planted varieties based not on a Burgundian model but rather on what made climatic sense. Pinot Gris was a big part of those early calculations. In his 1992 speech entitled ‘The Emergence of Pinot Gris’, Lett joked that the variety was still emerging at the time, recalling the slow sales that Pinot Gris found in the early days at Eyrie. He claimed to have bartered
