Tai-Ran Niew’s Chardonnay 2022
For winemaker Tai-Ran Niew, chardonnay exists in memory of Burgundy and carries forward to the future of Oregon. Tai-Ran’s memories of drinking bottles of legendary Burgundy villages like Puligny and Chassagne were enough to influence him to plant a vineyard. However, not to imitate these places, his practice of farming is situated instead in recognizing the exact nature of his place, his vineyard on Parrett mountain.
His wine project seeks to draw awareness of the biodiverse, fertile, and wildly alive place that Oregon is. Perhaps most importantly, Niew Vineyards is all about deepening a winemaker’s connection with their vineyard. In his case, this means watching the land grow, witnessing the process of adapting young vines to non-irrigated farming, and observing the shifts of flora and fauna in the vineyard.
First, he makes only one wine. Enter the 2022 release of Tai-Ran’s chardonnay! As in the past, (2021) this wine is purchased fruit from Eola Springs vineyard. Because of the way he has chosen to cultivate his land, it will take a long time for the vines to bear fruit. With these early wines, Tai-Ran aims to work first on his winemaking sensibility with the raw material from other Oregon vineyards. And the result is stunning.
Tai-Ran’s winemaking protocol for his chardonnay is simple. He is aiming to capture the “prettiness” of chardonnay, and prefers the lower alcohol level of the chardonnays of his memory. He jokes that his preference for this kind of wine only exists in the past, because only back then he could afford to buy Burgundy! We think that this wine could change the way you think about chardonnay from Oregon — an unadorned, graceful wine with the confidence of a solo piano record.
This wine represents a step along the path. Tai-Ran Niew planted a vineyard to 13 different clones of chardonnay in the Parrett Mountain zone of the Willamette Valley. Unlike many farms in Oregon, Tai-Ran’s singular focus is on permaculture-inspired, extremely minimal farming. For instance, last year in 2023 Tai-Ran did exactly zero sprays in his vineyard, after moving away from even spraying milk. These efforts are in the service of cultivating resilient plants that can survive the vacillations of climate that Oregon has experienced in recent years. His early goal is to understand what a dry month is through feeling it in the air and the plant material in lieu of quantifying it.
As a result, the vines are building resiliency mainly in their root systems. We have written more about the details of his vineyard planting here — click here to read all about it.
While he waits for the vineyard to bear a substantial enough crop to make wine, he is honing his winemaking with purchased fruit from Eola Springs Vineyard, a site in the Eola-Amity hills on volcanic basalt.