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Get your Gris on next weekend in Oregon wine country

By Andy Perdue on August 10, 2013

Oregon wineries are celebrating “Get Your Gris On” next weekend. (Photo via Flickr/click for credit)

Oregon is going to “get its Gris on” next weekend, as the wine industry focuses itself on its No. 1 white wine grape.

“Oregon, Get Your Gris On” is Aug. 17-18 and is sponsored by the Oregon Pinot Gris advocacy group and was an idea that came out of the third annual Oregon Pinot Gris Symposium, held in June at Oak Knoll Winery in Hillsboro.

For the inaugural “Oregon, Get Your Gris On” event, 16 wineries will participate, including:

‘Get Your Gris On’ highlights

Pinot Gris is, in fact, not a white grape, as it turns pink when it’s ready to be harvested. (Photo via Flickr/click for credit)

Airlie Winery will offer a vertical tasting of 2009, 2010 and 2011 Pinot Gris.
Naked Winery will offer a vertical tasting of 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 vintages of Pinot Gris.
Pudding River will offer a six-year vertical (2007-2012).
Oak Knoll will pair Pinot Gris with cheeses from House of Castello.
Emerson Vineyards will pair “Pinot Gris and Things from the Sea” – seafood and its 2012 Pinot Gris.
Apolloni Vineyards, which makes both a Pinot Gris and an Italian-style Pinot Grigio, will conduct an educational tasting to show the differences.

The event is being organized by Jo Diaz of Diaz Communications, the executive director of Oregon Pinot Gris.

Pinot Gris has been Oregon’s No. 1 white grape since 2000 when it surpassed Chardonnay. Today, Oregon harvests about 6,000 tons of Pinot Gris per year, enough for about 370,000 cases of wine.

Oregon’s largest Pinot Gris producer is King Estate, which makes 160,000 cases of Pinot Gris and sells it in all 50 states and 25 countries. Though Pinot Gris has been grown in Oregon since the 1960s, the grape didn’t catch on until King Estate made it a priority in the early 1990s.

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About Andy Perdue

Andy Perdue is the editor and publisher of Great Northwest Wine. He is a third-generation journalist who has worked at newspapers since the mid-1980s and has been writing about wine since 1998. He co-founded Wine Press Northwest magazine with Eric Degerman and served as its editor-in-chief for 15 years. He is a frequent judge at international wine competitions. He is the author of "The Northwest Wine Guide: A Buyer's Handbook" (Sasquatch, 2003) and has contributed to four other books. He writes about wine for The Seattle Times. You can find him on Twitter and Google+.