White Rose Estate

Greg Sanders grew up on the East Coast, moved to Southern California after college, and spent more than a decade building a manufacturing company in aerospace. In 1995 he started taking viticulture and enology courses at UC Davis, hoping to own a small vineyard someday. After several scouting trips to Oregon he bought an existing ten-acre property in the Dundee Hills in 2000, planted around 1980. It was called White Rose Vineyard, and he kept the name.

The first vintage came in 2001, at a couple hundred cases. It’s now around 3,000, drawn from the estate’s fourteen acres plus fruit from premier sites across the northern valley, and focused almost entirely on Pinot Noir.

Sanders is a Burgundy devotee who uses Grand Cru wines as his reference point. His approach, which he calls Neo-Classical winemaking, centers on whole-cluster fermentation. He began experimenting in 2004 and moved toward using stems almost exclusively in the estate wines. Fruit is harvested into canvas totes to keep the clusters intact, macerated by pumping over rather than punching down, and aged in a low proportion of new French oak. The result is distinctive — more aromatic lift and textural grip than most Dundee Hills Pinot.

Jesús Guillén shaped much of that work. He had a degree in computer systems engineering, taught himself winemaking from books, joined his father at White Rose, and worked under Sanders and Mark Vlossak at St. Innocent. He became cellarmaster in 2004 and head winemaker in 2008, earning some of the highest scores ever given an Oregon Pinot Noir and launching his own small label in 2013. He was the first Mexican-American winemaker in the Willamette Valley, and he mentored and advocated for many who followed. He died in 2020, and his influence on this valley is still being felt.

Greg Urmini leads winemaking now, after fourteen years with Paul Hobbs across California and Argentina’s Viña Cobos. He came to the Willamette Valley in 2021.

The tasting room is built into the hillside with the winery beneath it, surrounded by manicured lavender gardens and a large old tree, looking out across the valley to Mount Hood.