Kelley Fox - Willamette Valley, Oregon
Kelley Fox at the top of Maresh Vineyard’s “long rows”. Photo by FTNW creative
A divine forest photographed by Kelley Fox while solo traveling along the islands of the Andaman Sea.
When we meet with Kelley Fox on a bluebird June morning at the historic Maresh Vineyard, the first thing she talks about are the trees. She points to a Deodar Cedar and explains that in Sanskrit it is known as “the tree of the Gods,” “deva” meaning god and “daru” meaning wood. She has imagined wrapping the holy tree in ribbons, the way she saw while traveling alone along the islands of the Andaman Sea. Then turning to take in the wider expanse of the vineyard, which crosses Worden Hill Road in the Willamette Valley’s Dundee Hills, she moves our attention to shady groves of 110 year old Royal Ann Cherries and Black Walnuts that interrupt the steady march of self-rooted pinot vines up the hillside. Jim Maresh Sr. planted these trees, aware of the dangers of monoculture, creating also a permanent trust for a sequoia forest in the southeast corner, a habitat for owls and hawks.
We have come to talk about Kelley’s pinot, pure ethereal wines that have captivated our collective palates for years. But she knows this place too well to want to talk about yields per acre or trellising systems. What interests Kelley is the essence of the vineyard – a constantly changing living system affected by every tree, weed, and bird not to mention the unseen networks of life underground.
As an example, Kelley points out a section of vines that she has been working with since 2008 – “the Long Rows,” she calls them. An uninterrupted block like this can “break your spirit,” she says. You might spend a whole day and only finish one row doing the slow meticulous work of tending a vineyard by hand. “It’s an opportunity for humility and relieving yourself of your ego,” she goes on. Here at Maresh, Kelley’s Long Rows are on the eastern edge of the walnut grove, planted so close together in places that they appear to be holding hands. Growing up sharing shade and soil with the walnut trees may have kept these vines slender and low-yielding, but each berry here has concentrated power and flavor, and the essence of black walnut.
Kelley’s focus and intention as a winegrower and maker is to clearly transmit the specific energy of the vineyard. She calls it the “magic and spirit of the place.” And “Pinot does one thing,” she tells us. “It tells the truth.”
The backstory…
In the late 1980’s Kelley moved to Oregon from Dallas, Texas to purse a graduate degree in biochemistry and biophysics at Oregon State. She has been interested in flower essences and holistic medicine since childhood and has a keen intuition for the living systems and unseen forces at work in the world. But Kelley also has a mind for rigorous science. She wanted to examine the academic perspective and learn to understand life on the molecular level.
While a student at OSU, Kelly broke her arm playing a college sport – a minor accident that would ultimately influence her path. She was wearing a cast on her arm at the Corvallis Beanery one afternoon when someone also wearing an arm cast appeared. With their common injuries to provide a perfect opening, the two met and hit it off.
Sterling Fox had injured himself cleaning a carboy at Tyee Wine Cellars, one of the less-well-known early Oregon pinot pioneers. Before long, Kelley was helping Sterling plant a new vineyard by the Broadley estate in Monroe. She was living on a student salary in a double-wide outside of the town of Alsee. Her house-wines were from local Oregon families in the $6-$11 category, but she and Sterling also started drinking Broadley pinots that he had received in a work trade. The seed was planted.
In the years that followed, Kelley helped in vineyards, cellars and tasting rooms. She and Sterling had two girls and moved to the house where Bill Fuller and his family had lived while working to establish Tualatin Vineyards. And then, in the year 2000, like lightning, like a calling, the latent seed that had been slowly germinating sprouted. Kelley tells us that she was holding winery fittings one day when she just felt it. This is what she wanted to do.
She started looking for winemaking jobs all over the Willamette Valley and eventually found an opening at Torii Mor. This was the same year that Patty Green, who had been the winemaker there since 1993, left the business. So while Kelley was hired for a marketing position, within the year she was General Manager and Winemaker.
Maybe you are imagining Kelley in one of the tidy, modern wine cellars you see dotting Oregon’s hillsides today. But this was twenty-one years ago. Kelley tells us about trying to squeegee water uphill to the single, teeny drain that existed at Torii Mor back then - one drain for processing 100 tons, or 200,000 lbs, of winegrapes. There was no laboratory service, no equipment repair. If the forklift broke, the winemaker fixed it. Winemaking then required flexibility, ingenuity, humor, and a whole lot of heart. It was the kind of mad passionate endeavor that brings out the best in people, keeps you up all hours of the night, and most importantly creates camaraderie.
Kelley Fox with David Lett. Photo from wineterroirs.com
During her second vintage at Torii Mor, Kelley met David Lett, the founder of Eyrie Vineyards and the first person to plant pinot in the Willamette Valley. In an interview with the Oregon Wine History Archive, Kelley fondly recalls him always wearing a “safari outfit with a handkerchief” and recounts staging a synchronized forklift ballet, complete with red streamers, to prove to David that her harvest crew “had mastered not only safety but also the finer points of forklift operation.” It was a performance strictly for the purpose of mischievous fun, but Oregon wine was built on relationships created in moments like this. When David needed an assistant at Eyrie Vineyards in 2003, he called on Kelley Fox.
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A ripe Royal Anne. Photo by FTNW creative
Back at Maresh Vineyard this June 2021, we tell Kelley that we want to walk the Long Rows. She leads us across Worden Hill Road, through the decadent Queen Anne cherries and up a hill toward the Star of Bethlehem block. As we walk, she talks about David Lett.
On her first day at Eyrie, David placed three black glasses in front of her and asked her to taste. In them were two Eyrie whites and a pinot noir. She couldn’t tell the difference. Kelley learned a lesson that day that she has carried with her and incorporated into her own winemaking style: a good pinot should feel like a white wine that happens to be red – structured more by acid than by tannin.
With a little seed money from her dad, Kelley had the opportunity to set out on her own and start Kelley Fox Wines in 2007. By then, she was the winemaker at Scott Paul Wines in Carlton and was able to share space to make just over a hundred cases in her first vintage. Now, she is based at ADEA Wine Co. in Gaston where she works with six different vineyard sites including her original two: Maresh and Momtazi. Going beyond the specificity of a single vineyard designation, many of her wines come from only one or two vineyard blocks, limiting the potential for scalability in favor of distinction. In the cellar, she works gently, but with the music at full blast, an artist who wants nothing more than to be in her studio. She does not inoculate with commercial yeasts or use “enhancements” of any kind such as acid, tannin, sugar, or water. Her wines are pure, fresh, cerebral, and welcoming, with perfectly integrated tannins.
As we arrive in the Star of Bethlehem block, Kelley’s stories continue. This is where Jim Maresh’s favorite cherry tree stood until a storm knocked it down. After salvaging what he could, Jim burned the rest where it lay and the tree’s ashes now contribute to the block’s growing environment. The first time she met Jim Maresh and his daughter Martha was at Loie’s funeral over near that barn. That was around the same time she met the Momtazis whose Demeter certified vineyard she has also worked with since the beginning. Kelley likes self-rooted vines and big-hearted people. She tells us about a photo album she keeps of all the meals and flowers Martha Maresh has surprised her with over the years, tucked under vines and on end posts.
For Kelley, this place is not just Jory soil under fifty-year old Wadenswil vines. It is history and love and trust – the kind of deep roots that take time to grow and can never be replicated. She walks these rows with eternally young eyes, pointing out yellow tansys and red-tailed hawks. Weeds and birdsong tell you a lot about the environment, she tells us as we begin our descent from the top of the Long Rows.
“The ladies know what they’re doing” Kelley quotes a common phrase of Martha Maresh. Photo by FTNW creative
Kelley has been showing up at Maresh like this for nearly fifteen years, observing tiny details as she works from vine to vine. It’s a secret she heard from David Lett early on: to trust the plants. But it took patience, humility, and years of observation to develop the intuition to follow his advice. Kelley Fox has put in the time.
Since she first discovered Oregon wine as a student in the 90’s, she has been going deeper, just like the self-rooted old-vines she prefers. And just like the plants, she has been finding rich sources of nutrition. The vineyard and cellar are her apothecary, her science lab, her church. Her pinot does what she says it will – it tells the truth, the honest story of people, place, and time. And from the curious mind and the capable hands of Kelley Fox, expect only an earnest tale of tree roots and insects, loving relationships and mischievous pranks, safari outfits, surprise lunches, weeds and birdsong.
(BK)
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