Idylwood Winery
917 SE Yamhill
St., 236-3890
Tasting Room Hours: 1-6 pm Thursday-Saturday 2-5 pm Sunday
$2 tastes
Idylwood Winery
will be featured in the March issue of Oregon Wine magazine.
For the first
time, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms recently
decided to allow winemakers to list the positive health
benefits of wine on a separate label on the bottle.
The wine country sounds nice enough, if you like that kind
of thing...the Old country, the Amish country, the wine country.
But please, not until I'm 40. That's when people experience
a crisis and hit the road on tandem bicycles, lighting out
for places like the wine country.
But you no longer have to leave the city limits, or even
hit 40, to make this rite of passage, because Portland has
its first urban winery.
The Idylwood Winery is located just one block south
of Belmont Street in the sleepy old produce section of close-in
Southeast. Vintner Tony Németh describes it as the
only commercial winery in Portland that is open to the public
and dedicated to serving the wine-lovers of our fair city.
On Feb. 5, Idylwood Winery put the finishing touches on
its growth plan and opened its wine-tasting room.
In 1989, Németh came to Oregon via California and
began making wine cooperatively, as he had done previously
in California. He transitioned into commercial winemaking
in 1998. He and Stephen Lojacono, assistant winemaker, share
a goal to have a stable of small vineyards using the Idylwood
winery for all steps of the winemaking process, from de-stemming
to fermentation, bottling and labeling.
Now in its third year since making the transition from
amateur to commercial, Idylwood Winery is working to market
itself and prove that Portland can support an urban winery.
Because wineries without vineyards tend to be looked down
upon, this can be difficult. Most people, Németh
concedes, have a little trouble accepting a winery without
a vineyard attached. Few people know that in the days of
yore most vineyards sent their grapes out for bottling,
so what Idylwood is doing is actually nothing new. The majority
of the grapes used in Idylwood wines travel from Newberg's
Coral Creek Vineyard and the Silver Falls and Salem Hills
Vineyard.
When you visit the small warehouse space there's a self-guided
tour of the wine-making process. Each step is explained
on small signs: from fermentation, press, the de-stemmer
and chilling units to the stainless steel and oak tanks.
I tried the pinot noir, described by Idylwood as a compact
blend of cedary oak, spices and black cherry layered over
firm tannins. I don't know about all that, but it sure tasted
great and made me feel better, so I bought a bottle of city
wine for Mom and hit the road.
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 1,
2000
|
