Bethel Heights Cristom Winery Willamette Valley Wine Auction Pinot Noir Willamette Valley 2024

If you want to understand what makes the Eola-Amity Hills one of Oregon's most compelling wine addresses, these two estates are as good a place to start as any. Bethel Heights got there first: in 1977, twin brothers Ted and Terry Casteel and their wives Pat Dudley and Marilyn Webb cleared 25 acres of abandoned walnut trees on a volcanic hillside west of Salem and planted some of the first Pinot Noir vines in what would eventually become one of Oregon's most celebrated AVAs. Those original cuttings went into the ground ungrafted, on their own roots, at a time when almost no one was betting on Oregon to produce world-class Pinot Noir, and they remain among the last own-rooted Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines in the world today. Cristom arrived fifteen years later, in 1992, when Pittsburgh engineer and Burgundy devotee Paul Gerrie attended the International Pinot Noir Celebration in Oregon, came home convinced he had found his place, and purchased an abandoned winery site in the Eola Hills with his wife Eileen. He named the estate after his two children, Tom and Christine, hired winemaker Steve Doerner and vineyard manager Mark Feltz from day one, and set about building one of the valley's most meticulously farmed estates. Both producers have now passed the baton to their second generations: Ben Casteel makes the wines at Bethel Heights with the same unhurried precision his father Terry established, while Tom Gerrie leads Cristom alongside the irreplaceable Steve Doerner, who has been at the cellar since the very first vintage. The Jory volcanic soils, the cooling afternoon influence of the Van Duzer Corridor, and a shared commitment to native yeast fermentation, whole-cluster winemaking, and minimal intervention connect these two estates as much as their shared hillside, and the wines from both remain among the purest, most honest expressions of Oregon Pinot Noir being made today.