NAMPA, Idaho — The wine industry is dependent on consumer tastes and whims. What makes responding to market trends so difficult is that it takes three to seven years before the first vintage with a different grape variety goes from planting to pouring for a consumer.
With this long lead time, it’s a challenge Idaho winemakers and grape growers embrace every day as they make decisions now hoping to tickle the taste buds of wine drinkers in four or more years.
Take a look at Grüner Veltliner. The first large-scale commercial plantings are from the Huston Vineyards estate that went into the ground in 2018.
Williamson Vineyards planted their vines of the white Austrian grape in 2019. In October 2023, those grapes scored a Double Platinum and a 97-point score for the SCORIA Vineyards 2022 Grüner at Great Northwest Wine’s 24th annual Platinum Awards. Earlier in the year, that wine won a double gold at the Cascadia International Wine Competition.
Plantings of Grüner cover only 6 acres in Idaho — spread among Huston Vineyards, Williamson Vineyards and Snake River Winery winemaker Scott DeSeelhorst’s Arena Valley Vineyard — but the grape is impressing critics, growers, vintners and consumers.
Josh Alger of Lake Idaho Vineyards LLC and Huston Vineyards farms 3 acres of Grüner Veltliner. The vineyard manager for Great Northwest Wine’s 2023 Idaho Winery of the Year points to a depth of flavor and sense of minerality in the wines from his plantings. He believes those qualities are heightened because he took the extra step of ripping through the caliche layer of soil in the vineyard, thereby releasing nutrients locked into the soil and helping those vines to thrive. He likes to pair his family’s Grüner with Asian fare in the summer and schnitzel in the winter.
Arneis is a rarely seen Italian variety that was bottled in only a couple of places in Italy in the 1970s. Last year at Savor Idaho, Travis Walker of now-closed Par Terre Winery showcased a single-vineyard, standalone Arneis. With its autumnal notes and bone-dry structure, Arneis has gained a following in Idaho. The grapes came from Arena Valley Vineyard near Parma.
This winter, Veer winemaker/owner Will Wetmore took over the lease on Par Terre’s former tasting room site in Garden City and opened a revamped tasting room on Chinden Boulevard.
Arena Valley Vineyard is home to more than 20 varieties that make it into owner Scott DeSeelhorst’s Snake River Winery bottlings and a few other Idaho producers. The Parma site was established with mainstream varieties such as Riesling, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.
Since he purchased the property in 1998, DeSeelhorst has diversified with smaller blocks of Arneis, Grüner Veltliner, Blauer Zweigelt, Barbera, Montepulciano, Tempranillo and Sangiovese. He loves how Syrah develops in the Idaho soils and is excited about the Joseph Phelps clones he added to the vineyard a few years ago.
Next on his horizon are Viognier, Tempranillo and Verdejo. Even as DeSeelhorst is excited about the unique wines from Idaho producers, he senses the need for a national-scale wine company to invest in Idaho and ramp up the reputation and sales volumes of Idaho wines.
At the western end of the Snake River American Viticultural Area, just outside of Adrian, Ore., Emerald Slope Vineyards owner Tim Martin and his wife Kris have been focused on Rhône and Spanish varietals that seem to do really well.
In 2023, Melanie Krause of Cinder Wines used Verdejo from Emerald Slope to win a platinum medal at TEXSOM in Irving, Texas, a Double Platinum from Great Northwest Wine and a gold medal at the Idaho Wine & Cider Competition.
Telaya Wine Co., has been working with the Martins on the Marsanne and Roussanne for the Bandia wine blend as well as their Grenache Blanc.
Later this decade, Emerald Slope hopes to launch their own wine brand. Meanwhile, the Martins will continue their research into clonal selections and are considering planting Clairette Blanche, one of the historic Rhône white grapes.
For the Martins, the biggest challenge is the large initial expense of planting grapes with no income produced for the first three years. They have approximately 100 acres that could go into production quickly, however, they require the capital investment to compensate for that long lead time endemic to new plantings.
At the state’s largest vineyard — Sawtooth — and sister site Skyline — Jake Cragin has new plantings of Petit Verdot and Cinsault coming into their first commercial harvest. Those will be followed by additional blocks of Sangiovese, Nebbiolo and Carménère coming online in 2025. These were planted at the request of Telaya, Cinder and Sawtooth wineries.
New clones of Tempranillo also are going in, and Cragin says he’s confident the Idaho wine industry will be able to fully absorb these additional grapes.
Dale Jeffers, the longtime manager of both Skyline and Sawtooth, said he never imagined that these types of hot-climate varieties would work in these vineyards when he started planting them many years ago.
These new varieties may well be “blessings of climate change” as well as the start of the next adventure for the Idaho wine industry. So while some regions have a “signature grape” such as Pinot Noir in Oregon or Cabernet Sauvignon in the Napa Valley, the Snake River Valley — much like Washington state — has been graced with the ability to grow many varietals that meet world-class standards.
There will be challenges and worrisome aspects to these adventurous trials. For example, the fickle weather in the Snake River Valley hit 66 degrees in January of this year. However, the rewards are worth it.
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