Brick House Vineyards

The Free Bacchus Story

Doug Tunnell was born and educated in Oregon and spent his working life elsewhere, as a CBS News foreign correspondent from 1975 to 1992, based mostly in Beirut. Then he came home, bought a forty-acre hillside of old hazelnut and walnut orchard on Ribbon Ridge, in the northern Willamette Valley, and planted his first vines there in May 1990. He and his wife, Melissa Mills, live in the brick house the estate is named for. The winery is a drafty barn built in 1931.

The orchard had been sprayed for years, and because Tunnell was going to live among his vines he wanted to know with what. He tracked down some of the people who had done the spraying and pieced together a chemical history of the land, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides such as paraquat and DDT among them. He took the property organic, and by 2005 it was Demeter-certified Biodynamic.

The Willamette Valley is Oregon’s Pinot Noir country, cooler and wetter than Napa, and its wines are usually lighter and fresher than California Pinot. Brick House makes Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Gamay, the grape of Beaujolais. Tunnell bottled his first Gamay in 1992, the second in Oregon after Amity Cellars in 1988 by one writer’s account, and for many years his Due East Gamay was the region’s standard-bearer for the grape.

Phylloxera, the root louse that destroyed much of Europe’s vineyards in the nineteenth century, reached the estate, and Tunnell had to tear out part of the vineyard. For a couple of years afterwards he was short of fruit and bought some in, including two tons from his friends at Maysara, a biodynamically farmed estate near McMinnville.

One distinction matters here. Demeter’s standard includes the organic rules, but Brick House holds no separate USDA organic certificate, so we call it Demeter-certified Biodynamic and leave the organic label off.