Harper Voit Wines

Drew Voit grew up on a large family farm in California and planned to become a chemical engineer like his father. When he realized the good jobs in that field were in oil or plastics, he changed course and entered the winemaking program at UC Davis before he turned 21. A fellow student shared a case of Oregon wine, and that settled where he’d end up.

He spent the formative years of his career at Domaine Serene as associate winemaker and at Shea Wine Cellars as winemaker, working some of the best sites in the valley. He founded Harper Voit in 2009 after more than fifteen years studying winemaking, and he still consults for a number of Willamette producers while running a custom crush operation for small ultra-premium brands.

The premise is that terroir is objective rather than a matter of taste. His framing: their job is less about making wine than shepherding the characteristics of a particular vineyard into the bottle, and there’s a perfect expression of each plot they’re grasping at every year.

Fruit comes from sites across the valley on what he calls the strandline — the ancient beaches left when a lake covered this land 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. He makes five to seven Pinot Noirs a vintage, with single-vineyard bottlings under 100 cases each. Sources include Bieze Vineyard in the Van Duzer Corridor, Antiquum Farm, and Meredith Mitchell outside McMinnville.

The Pinot Blanc is what he’s best known for. Oregon has roughly 300 acres of it, and this was the first place in America where true Pinot Blanc was planted — what California calls Pinot Blanc is actually Melon de Bourgogne. Voit’s idea was to see what happens when the grape gets a Burgundian aging regimen: barrel fermented in used French oak, no new wood, large format barrels, aged on the lees. The result is the Surlie, and it drinks like a well-made Chardonnay with more tension.

There’s old-vine Riesling too, and sparkling. The team is three or four people.