MONROE, Ore. — It’s become impossible to overlook quaint and bucolic Bluebird Hill Cellars when discussing some of the Willamette Valley’s best examples of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris because the wines by Neil and Sue Shay continue to stand out.
Recent examples include their trio of gold medals at 2024 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition and the collaboration with Elena Delle Donne, a Women’s National Basketball Association superstar.
And in a four-week span last fall, Bluebird Hill received two Platinum Awards from Great Northwest Wine as well as two double gold medals and a gold at Great Northwest Invitational Wine Competition, the international judging staged in Oregon on behalf of West Coast wine buyers and media.
Those results from the San Francisco Chronicle judging in January merely added validation to Great Northwest Wine’s selection of Bluebird Hill Cellars as the 2024 Oregon Winery to Watch.
“When you have a small winery and you work the tasting room, you get to know the repeat visitors and they become friends,” Neil says, “and they will tell you your wine is good — whether or not it is. It’s good to have the validation of judgings and comparisons by magazines and professional tasters.”
Last summer, the Shays also received praise from Delle Donne, who specifically wanted a Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley for a new cause she’s supporting.
“We were excited to be invited to submit samples for the Deldon project and even more excited to have our 2021 Pinot Noir chosen,” Sue says. “Neil and I were the winemakers, and the fruit was sourced from Bluebird Hill and Zenith vineyards.”
And judges at the San Francisco Chronicle agreed with Delle Donne’s palate. The Bluebird Hill Cellars 2021 Barrel Select Pinot Noir ($54) that won a double gold this year is from the same lot as the Deldon 2021 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. The competition in Sonoma also awarded a gold to the Bluebird Hill 2021 Reserve Chardonnay ($54) and the 2021 Flagship Pinot Noir ($35).
Last fall, their Platinums were for the 2021 Pinot Gris ($25) and 2021 Chardonnay ($35).
9 Platinum Awards in 5 years for Bluebird Hill Cellars
The Shays have undoubtedly been a delicious run, having won nine Platinum awards in the past five years. Even at the age of 69, it’s rather heady stuff for the native of Fairfield, Conn.
“I remember growing up in the 60s as a kid, Almaden wine was a big deal,” Neil says. “It really wasn’t until I met Sue 24 years ago that I started getting more deeply into wine.”
When looking back on his career, it makes sense Neil is producing some of the Willamette Valley’s most delicious wines. The professor emeritus at Oregon State University specialized in nutritional biochemistry and molecular biology.
“Some of the award-winners you really like to pour for guests, and when you finish, the person will tell you that every one of those wines was really good,” Neil says. “Sometimes, they will tell you, ‘I was prepared to not like this wine, but it’s really good!’ Those strokes and rewards are really important.”
As one might expect from a lifelong educator, it’s been a methodical learning process. From 2002 to 2013, the Shays were hobby winemakers.
“We made wine every year — 10- to 20-gallon batches to individual barrels — and would send wines to judgings, first to Michigan and later to the Indy International and WineMaker Magazine,” he said.
They learned they had a knack for it, especially early on with Cabernet Franc, which brought the Shays back gold medals.
Oregon State professor plants vineyard in 2013
In 2010, Neil accepted a position at Oregon State, and that sparked Bluebird Hill Cellars, named for the birds that greeted them from the start.
“It was really our property that inspired us,” he says. “We just wanted to find a decent home with a nice view. We looked everywhere from Salem to far south of Corvallis. When we found this 6-acre property near the village of Alpine, it was covered with overgrown Christmas trees. And we figured if we took out those trees, it would probably be a good place to grow wine grapes.”
By 2013, they cleared enough land to plant the first block and turn it into a hobby vineyard with 2,500 cuttings. They planted about a similar number the next year, but they didn’t want to wait for estate grapes.
“Our first purchase was from Tim Ramey at Zenith Vineyard outside of Salem,” Neil says. “We made a 2014 Pinot Noir and a 2015 Pinot Gris and Chardonnay, which enabled us to open a tasting room during Memorial Day weekend of 2016.”
It wasn’t until 2017 when there was enough estate fruit to make an appreciable amount of wine. And the clones include Pommard, Wädenswil and Dijon clones 115, 667, 777 of Pinot Noir.
“We made an unfined and unfiltered Pinot Noir from 2017 and at that point, we said to ourselves, ‘Hey, there is something good going on here.’ We still pull bottles out from our library. I love that style, but we don’t practice it year in and year out.”
The pressure, it would seem, is to match their goals in terms of long-term quality rather than rush the bottles out for financial gain.
“Starting in 2017, aside from 2020, all of the Pinot Noir spends two full years in barrel,” he says. “We believe that helps the wine mature nicely in the second year. And our barrel program is 15% to 20% new French oak.”
They’ve incrementally increased to about 1,500 cases of production per year.
“We’re as big as we can be with our current facility and fermentation bins,” says Sue, who grew up a Hoosier and met Neil while he was teaching at Notre Dame. “And more than that, and we’d have to make our wines somewhere else.”
In recent years, to fill a desire for bolder red wines from the Columbia Valley, the Shays have collaborated with Rebecca De Kleine and her Four Feathers Wine Services team in Prosser on projects. In particular, there were three-barrels worth of a 2019 Syrah that brought back double gold medal from the Los Angeles Wine & Spirits Challenge, the Cascadia International and the Oregon judging in McMinnville.
“We’ve been sourcing Syrah for our Red Wine Blend from Four Feathers for several years now, and they do a wonderful job,” Sue says. “When we were tasting samples for our Red Wine Blend, we tasted both the 2019 Syrah from their Studio program — and we had to have it!”
And yet they are proud of the young winemakers and vineyard managers they’ve employed during the first decade of Bluebird Hill Cellars.
Josh Price, their associate winemaker and vineyard manager, is a 2015 graduate of Oregon State’s viticulture and enology program. During the 2018, 2020 and 2021 vintages, Nick Cheatham, a food science grad from Oregon State, served in those roles and opened his own wine shop in Corvallis. Alexis Doyle, an assistant in the cellar and vineyard, now works for Willamette Valley Vineyards.
“We hear negative things about the work ethic of kids these days, but we’ve been impressed with all of the kids who have helped us,” Sue says. “It’s been really fun to watch them grow within the industry.”
Bluebird Hill supports the young Mid-Willamette Valley Food Trail, and at this point, the vineyard only falls within the larger Willamette Valley American Viticultural Area. It is just beyond the boundary of the Lower Long Tom AVA, yet the Shays’s success with estate wines makes one believe that a “Monroe Hills AVA petition” has merit. A key feature is the channel that brings in cool air from the Coast Range akin to the Van Duzer Corridor, which earned its AVA in 2018.
“At about 4 o’clock every afternoon a breeze starts up, and the temperature drops 10 degrees,” Sue says.
And where Bluebird Hill Cellars is within the valley makes it a rather equal mix of green and orange — known as Civil War territory in the state’s most bitter school rivalry.
“The Corvallis newspaper box is orange, and the Eugene Register-Guard is green, and the boxes are about a 50/50 split. Five miles to the south of here, and all of the newspaper boxes are green,” Neil says.
For a time, Sue also operated a picturesque B&B on their estate, but now with Neil’s retirement from the university — although he still teaches part-time a bit — the Shays have decided to spend more of that time together.
A classic example is their winemaker cruise with AmaWaterways and DreamVacation.com along the Douro River in Portugal this spring. And Neil plans to devote more time to playing golf, a sport he picked up in junior high school as a caddy — his first paying job.
“When we started this, we told ourselves, ‘Well, we know what we’re going to be doing on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from now on,’ ” Neil says with a laugh. “But now, we have great help to get some time off to get away.”
Among those was a work trip to Fort Mason near the Golden Gate Bridge where they poured their gold medal winners from the San Francisco Chronicle judging — including the Deldon 2021 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, aka Bluebird Hill 2021 Barrel Select Pinot Noir.
- Bluebird Hill Cellars, 25059 Larson Road, Monroe, OR 97456, BluebirdHillCellars.wine, (541) 424-2478
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