Montinore Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

Montinore takes its name from a homesick lawyer. John Forbis bought the land at Forest Grove, west of Portland, around the turn of the last century, thought it looked like Montana, and called it Montinore Ranch. It grew other crops for decades. Then Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, ash fell on the fields for months, and the Graham family, who owned it by then, had the land surveyed by teams from Oregon State University and UC Davis. Both said grapes. The first vines went in in 1982.

The Willamette Valley is Oregon’s Pinot Noir country. It is cooler and wetter than Napa, and the wines tend to show it, lighter and more savoury than most California Pinot. Rudy Marchesi came to Montinore in 1998 as a vineyard consultant. He had noticed that many of the French wines he admired were farmed biodynamically, and with phylloxera threatening the vines he began farming that way in 2003. He bought the estate in 2005, and the vineyard was certified by Demeter in 2008.

Scaling it up was the hard part. Marchesi has written that he had used biodynamics on gardens and hay fields, not on 240 acres of vines. The team had to mechanise the stirring of the vineyard sprays and learn to build compost piles hundreds of tons at a time. Much of the yeast that ferments the wine now comes from the vineyard itself. In 2016 the Ackley family bought Montinore, the start of what became Ackley Brands, with Marchesi as a partner, and the same year added Tidalstar, a second vineyard in Yamhill-Carlton.

The certificates are broad. Demeter lists Montinore as both a biodynamic farm and a winery, and CCOF certifies its crops and its winemaking. But on the US organic register, 107 of Montinore’s 109 wines are listed as made with organic grapes, the category that allows added sulfites, so they cannot carry the USDA organic seal. Montinore’s own description of the Red Cap puts it accurately: made with Demeter-certified biodynamic grapes.