pisco negroni
Recipe
Grape(s)
Vermentino, Roussanne
Place
Applegate Valley
Producer
Troon
ABV (%)
12.5
Contents (ML)
750
Collab No.
PF - 16
For this year’s Wine Club Exclusive, we’ve rescued an orphaned barrel of biodynamically farmed Orange wine from our favorite Southern Oregon winery, Troon. Blended from two grapes, Vermentino and Roussanne, these are the kind of lost treasures that make us love what we do.
STORY
A Vintage Left Behind
Written by Brent Braun
Troon Winery is based in Applegate Valley, in Southern Oregon. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Maybe you haven’t. We wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t. For most Oregon wine lovers, Willamette Valley is the gold standard, the shiny coated, pure breed hunting hound, while Southern Oregon is more like the hairless, snaggle toothed, found it on the side of the road stray. Not to say there isn’t quality wine being made down there, but paucity of great producers is palpable. Troon has been around since the 70s, but for us they had always blended into the morass of middling Southern Oregon wineries. You could often find the wines anchoring down the bottom shelves of the Fred Meyer wine department. Real. Exciting. Stuff. But all that changed in 2017.
In 2017 they got purchased by a family with a background in medicine and they made the immediate decision to heal what had been a pretty badly wounded property. Chemical farming had stripped the land barren and the vineyards looked like a depiction of the 1940s Oklahoma dustbowl. The new owners converted to organic, bidoynamic and regernative farming. In fact, they are one of only 4 farms in the world be certified gold standard regnerative. The property had gardens, ponds, animal husbandry, the whole nine yards. If that wasnt enough, they made the decision to graft over the vineyards to a whole slew of interesting grape cultivars. Being that Southern Oregon has no real guiding vision for what it should be (in contrast to the Willamettte Vally, which is defined by Pinot Noir and Chardonnay) it was a smart move to just give everything a whirl. All in all, they now have 20 different varieties planted, most of which are fairly unheard of in Oregon (Negrette, Bourboulanc, Roussanne, Tibouren, Counoise, just to name a few.)