A young viticulture graduate, a former orchard and a pair of hawks.

The Eyrie Vineyards is the winery that began the modern story of Pinot Noir in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Its founder, David Lett, was 24, with a degree in viticulture and another in philosophy, when he left California for Oregon, the winery says, convinced that the valley’s cool climate could suit Pinot Noir and Chardonnay as well as anywhere outside Burgundy. Wine Spectator reported in 2008 that in 1965 Lett brought 3,000 vines north from California over the objections of his viticulture professors at the University of California, Davis. The company dates his first planting to 22 February 1965.

He was soon joined by Diana Lett. In a 2015 note on the winery’s site, Diana recalls meeting David in 1966 and, three months later, standing in a field of vines in Oregon as his wife with a shovel and a brand-new yellow rain suit. Together they planted and expanded their estate on a former orchard in the Dundee Hills, the company says, on the red volcanic soil known as Jory, which is now Oregon’s state soil. Wine Spectator gives 1966 as the year the winery was founded; English Wikipedia lists 1965 as its founding year and 1970 as its first vintage.

The name came from the hillside itself. The company says a pair of red-tailed hawks nested in the fir trees at the top of the vineyard and kept the couple company as they worked, and that it was Diana who named the enterprise “The Eyrie,” the word for a bird of prey’s nest. English Wikipedia credits the Letts with the first Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley and the first Pinot Gris in the United States; the company puts it as the first Pinot Gris planted commercially outside Europe. That original planting, now known as the Original Vines, became the first of five estate vineyards.

One bottle of 1975 Pinot Noir and a winemaker from Beaune.

The Eyrie name travelled through a single wine. In 1979 the French guide Gault-Millau held an international tasting that English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of October 1979, says brought together 330 wines from 33 countries before 62 judges of ten nationalities. Eyrie’s 1975 South Block Pinot Noir was among them, and Wine Spectator reported in 2008 that its showing drew the attention of Robert Drouhin, head of the Burgundy house Joseph Drouhin. Drouhin staged a second tasting in France, and Linfield University’s Willamette Valley archive keeps a fax dated 13 February 1980 reporting Eyrie’s result there.

The story did not end with the tastings. Wine Spectator reported that Robert Drouhin began visiting Oregon and that David Lett and the winemaker David Adelsheim helped him find land in the Dundee Hills for what became Domaine Drouhin Oregon.

The brand’s style grew from restraint. English Wikipedia says Lett, known locally as “Papa Pinot,” kept to a light-handed Pinot Noir and did not believe that depth of colour signalled quality. The company describes a cellar that still works that way: native yeasts for the red wines, full natural malolactic fermentation, no fining and minimal filtration, a 60-year-old Willmes basket press, and only one new barrel in every 25. It says it still makes wine in 12 of the first barrels it bought nearly 50 years ago, and that in 1974 David Lett identified a strain of malolactic bacteria living in the cellar that still works in every wine.

The range reaches beyond Pinot Noir. English Wikipedia lists Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay, Melon de Bourgogne, Trousseau Noir and Muscat Ottonel among its varieties.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Oregon and Washington wineries: Domaine Serene, Cristom, Bergström, The Eyrie Vineyards, Leonetti Cellar, Quilceda Creek and Cayuse Vineyards. Wineries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single wine can be sold everywhere from a mailing list to a restaurant list.

A winery’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually grown, made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A poultry plant in McMinnville and a second generation.

The wine is grown in the Dundee Hills and made in town. Wine Spectator reported in October 2012 that the winery is housed in an old poultry plant in McMinnville, Oregon, while the estate vineyard that produced the 1975 South Block lies in what is now the Dundee Hills American Viticultural Area. The company says all five of its estate vineyards sit on south-facing slopes in the Dundee Hills, that all five are certified organic, and that since the first vine they have been farmed without herbicides, pesticides, tillage or irrigation. English Wikipedia puts the estate at about 60 acres.

The winery has passed from father to son. The company says Jason Lett, David and Diana’s son, worked his first vintage at Eyrie in 1973 and came back as winemaker in 2005; Wine Spectator reported in 2008 that David Lett retired that year and handed the winery to Jason. David Lett died in October 2008, Wine Spectator reported that month, and Wine Spectator wrote in 2012 that he had finished blending the 2007 South Block a week before. Eyrie remains a family business: the company describes Jason Lett as proprietor, winemaker and co-owner, overseeing all of production and the business, with Diana Lett, the co-founder, still taking an active part. Since 2005, the company says, the winery has moved to wild-yeast fermentations, introduced new varieties to the valley and released single-vineyard Pinot Noirs from each of its estates for the first time. Wine Spectator reported in 2012 that Jason’s own label, BlackCap, started in 2002, is also made at Eyrie.

Online, the name needs its context: “eyrie” is an ordinary English word for an eagle’s or hawk’s nest, used by many unrelated businesses, and some writers drop the final “s” from Vineyards. The winery’s site is eyrievineyards.com.

For a design guide, The Eyrie Vineyards shows how a winery can take its name from a pair of hawks and its authority from being first, and keep both in one family’s hands for six decades. Compare Joseph Drouhin, the Beaune house drawn to Oregon by Eyrie’s 1975 Pinot Noir, and Bergström, a later Willamette Valley family house. For this guide we use hawk rust, Douglas fir and feather buff with a humanist serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Eyrie Vineyards’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.