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Mike visits Sam Tannahill from Rex Hill and A to Z Wineworks in Willamette Valley for an in depth look at some of the best values in wine coming out of Oregon. If you haven't tried Oregon wines, you're missing out!
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[Oregon's Willamette Valley. (Willamette rhymes with dammit.)]

Part One: Rex Hill / A to Z Wineworks

Mike Supple: Alright. Day one of the trip and I'm at Rex Hill Winery right now, about to meet Sam Tannahill, who is the director of viticulture and winemaking at both A to Z Wineworks and Rex Hill.

Sam Tannahill: We really want to provide our clients with an authentic drinking experience of Oregon at a great price. And our backgrounds being Burgundy, Archery Summit, Chehalem, New Zealand, Australia, Domaine Drouhin - we have a great background making high-end wines, very small quantities of high-end wine. Starting A to Z was sort of a challenge for us, but there's something really rewarding being able to make - we just finished bottling 63,000 cases of out 2008 Pinot Noir, and it's great - being able to make that much wine and to offer it around $18 - $19 and have that high quality is really rewarding for us. It's a different adventure, but it's been really great for us. Our mission at A to Z is not trying to get rich. We want the growers to have a good living, we want to make a good living, we want the distributors to make a good living, the retailers to make a good living, and the final client who drinks our wine to get a really fairly value-priced great wine, all the way down.

We started with Pinot Noir and then soon expanded to Pinot Gris. And then I have an insatiable thirst for different vineyards and different grapes, so we kept on adding and adding. We've expanded to where we feel comfortable now with the rosé made from 100% Sangiovese, a Riesling, a Pinot Blanc - all three made in small quantities, around 800 to 1500 cases. And then the next step up is a Chardonnay, which we make about 12,000 cases a year, which is actually growing. I think Chardonnay in Oregon is the next story - Chardonnay is in a place where Pinot Noir was 20 years ago - there is going to be some fantastic Chardonnay on the horizon. And then of course we make Pinot [Noir] and Pinot Gris - those are the two mainstays of our production. And we also make a blended Big Red, which is, depending upon the year, a combination of Cab Franc, Cab, Merlot, Syrah, and then once again since I love buying things, a little bit of Grenache, Mourvedre, Pinotage, Petit Verdot, Malbec - just things that I like experimenting with. It's really based on southern Oregon in the Rogue Valley.

One thing that's really important to us for A to Z is to make sure we have a homogenous blend, since we do make such a big amount of wine. What we don't do is bottle two lots. We don't bottle one lot of A to Z Pinot then another lot of A to Z Pinot. What we do is make one blend and we continue to bottle from there. So it can be tricky, but we have a couple of 20,000 gallon tanks and a 36,000 gallon tank that we try to get the bulk of our blend in, as much as we can. It's a little bit of a chess match - or Chinese checkers - but we end up getting everything done.

Everything that's bottled for A to Z is bottled in screw cap. Rex Hill we do partially in screw cap and partially in cork finish. We do have our own bottling line so we can bottle whenever we want. All of A to Z is bottled here, and with the production now we are bottling about nine months out of the year. We want all of A to Z to be drunk within a year. Though I do have some potential reservations about how red wines perhaps age under screw cap - it's not really reservations; it's that we just don't know how they'll age. Will they change, will they evolve? Because we're used to having wines age under cork. But for the most part, I think screw cap is the way we're going to go.

With A to Z we've never raised prices, we've only lowered prices. Our mission is to consistently offer - be it Rex Hill or A to Z - a better than, I hate to say a value wine because we don't necessarily want to offer a value wine per se, but we want to offer better than the price point would suggest.