Winemaker Notes
"Valley of Flowers" pays respect to our name, the AVA, and the expression of our winery home at Corral Creek. Looking to our next 30 years, we want to follow the example set by the Calapooia tribe centuries ago: to treat our land with great care and to continue our mission of creating a sustainable future. Made with fruit from our oldest vineyard, this wine is composed of old-vine Pommard and Wädenswil planted in 1983. It spent a year aging in a new Sirugue, and another five months in a neutral barrel before bottling.
The story of Chehalem is rooted in a deep and abiding reverence for the land. From the vineyards we nurture and harvest to the wine we blend and age, we handle every step with respect for sustainable practices. We consider ourselves a vineyard winery. We aim to reflect what the vineyard has produced, purely, with minimal processing and without compromising great fruit. A staple of the Downtown Newberg wine scene, our tasting room is open seven days a week. Old-school winemaking, Oregon-style!
Chehalem is considered a vineyard winery, aiming to reflect what the vineyard has produced, purely, with minimal processing and without compromising great fruit. Their name, Chehalem, translates to Valley of Flowers in the Native American language, Calapooia. It’s their goal to follow the example set centuries ago: to treat the land with great care and to continue the mission of creating a sustainable future.
Their story starts in 1990 with the inaugural Pinot Noir harvest at Ridgecrest Vineyard. As those wines were releasing in 1993, Bill Stoller joined as co-owner. He subsequently purchased his family farmlands at the southern tip of the Dundee with the vision of planting it as our second estate vineyard.
In 1995, they purchased Corral Creek, the vineyard surrounding the winery. It became the third estate vineyard.
In early 2018, Bill became the sole owner of Chehalem, and by July, they had become the sixth Oregon winery to achieve B Corp status. This rigorous certification assesses companies to ensure they meet the highest standard of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.
The Chehalem Mountains is a northwest-southeast span of several distinct mountains, ridges and peaks in the northern part of the Willamette Valley. Of all of Willamette Valley's smaller AVAs, it is closest to the city of Portland. Its highest summit, Bald Peak at an elevation of 1,633 feet, serves to generate cooler air for the rest of the AVA and its hillside vineyards. The region covers 70,000 acres but only 1,600 acres are planted to vines; soils of the Chehalem Mountains are a mix of basalt, ocean sediment and loess.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”