March 2026 - Oregon
Featuring:
Grochau Cellars
Hanson Vineyards
This month we’re back in Oregon for our wine club. It’s a region we all (or mostly all) call home to and are intimately familiar with. It’s also one we’ve covered several times. You can find a few of our informative writeups for past clubs here - October 2025, May 2024, April 2024, November 2024.
While we’d usually find something new and compelling to write about regardless of how many times we’ve covered a region, this month is an exception. As you undoubtedly know, we’re seven weeks into an all-encompassing renovation of our space - the first in five years. It’s taken over a year of planning and we’ve been all hands on deck since the start of 2026. We’re 95% done, opening in just a few days and, unfortunately, a compromise we have to make is this wine club writeup being a bit truncated.
That said, even if the writeup lacks its usual fervor, the wines are by no means an afterthought. One is a remarkably original wine to Oregon - made here but never seeing the light of day in this market. The other is a small production gem we stumbled upon but absolutely love. Don’t let the lack of verbosity fool you - these are great wines with a compelling story. And while we plan to tell it, we’ll skip the general lesson that usually precedes it.
Hanson, ‘Here/There’ Alsatian Field Blend, Willamette Valley 2023
Hanson is one of the few remaining true vigneron projects around. Jason Hanson co-founded the winery with his father, Clark, in the early 2000’s. The 100+ year-old farm has been in the Hanson family for four generations, previously operating as a walnut orchard and berry farm. Located in Monitor, Oregon (~5mi SE of Woodburn), the vineyards and winery are off the beaten path of the ‘heart’ of the Willamette Valley, however are still within the broad reaching boundaries of the region.
Jason farms two distinct vineyard sites. The Estate Vineyard - roughly 9.5 acres - is a mix of varieties planted on the family’s traditional farmland. Half the vineyard is a rocky creekbed washed away from Butte Creek over the centuries. This is where they farm Riesling and several clones of Pinot Noir. The other portion of this vineyard is heavy clay from the Missoula floods, similar to the rest of the ‘floor’ of the Willamette Valley. For clay, this soil drains remarkably well and has a high acid-profile, which is great for vines. Their alternative/experimental varieties are grown here - Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Gamay, Gewürztraminer, Marechal Foch, Auxerrois, Leon Millot, and Golubok.
The other vineyard, the Aamodt Block, is located a few miles North, next to Aamont Dairy. The site was planted in the 1980s to Pommard clone Pinot Noir and was neglected for a decade before the Hansons took it over and revitalized it: clearing wild blackberries, trellising, and replanting empty spots.
In the field and cellar, John has similar approaches of ‘old-world’ minimal intervention and low chemical use. Being a farmer who lives amongst the vines, he sees no benefit to using harsh pesticides and prefers to farm organic (though eschews costly certification). Wines ferment naturally with native yeasts. Any oak aging (primarily Pinots) is done in old, neutral oak.
This wine, ‘Here/There’ is a field-blended wine from Hanson. It is made from Alsatian varieties: primarily Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, and Riesling, with smaller amounts of Gewürztraminer, and Muscat. Field blends are an old-world way of making wine where all the grapes are picked together at the same time and fermented together. This takes careful timing and allows the different ripening times to balance one another out. The alternative is the more scientific and ‘new world’ approach of harvesting and fermenting each block or variety separately and blending them based on taste once the wines are finished fermenting and/or aging. One is not inherently better than the other, however field blends definitely lean more into the romance of the craft.
2023 ‘Here/There’ shows aromas of white/yellow flowers, ripe golden apple, and oxidative pear. It has a bright acid profile, a medium body, nice round texture on the palate, and shows a long, dry finish.
When sampling the wine for club, we enjoyed this with some red curry, spicy Pad see ew, and Tom Kha Gai from our neighbors at Cha’Ba Thai and enjoyed it immensely! Alsatian varieties, even when fermented dry, compliment spicy food incredibly well.
GC Cellars, ‘Ensemble’ Red Blend, Willamette Valley 2023
This wine is a unique Dogwood Club exclusive that we chanced upon, due to unfortunate circumstances involving global trade and politics. This specific cuvee of wine is made by Oregon’s own Grochau Cellars, but packaged and branded in partnership with a Canadian distributor exclusively for the Quebec market.
Due to the tension created by unwarranted (and now illegal) US tariffs on Canadian lumber and goods, the Canadian Federal Government targeted American alcohol - among other things - as a retaliatory surtax. Due to the higher taxes, as well as consumer boycotts, state liquor boards (in this case Quebec’s SAQ) quickly delisted all American products. As a result, the distributor and GC Cellars were sitting on a large amount of this wine with nowhere to sell it.
This is a common story with many Oregon wines. Being so close to Canada, a large number of our smaller winemakers rely heavily on the Canadian market - particularly urban restaurants and small wine shops - as a large portion of their sales. With this market essentially cut off overnight, many of these winemakers who were already working on razor thin margins are now sitting on piles of unsold inventory and uncertainty towards the future. To be successful, many businesses need to make careful decisions years in advance. In the wine industry, with one harvest a year and between 6-48 months of aging for a product, massive decisions must be made up to half a decade in advance sometimes. When governments haphazardly decide trade deals in bad faith, people’s career trajectories can change overnight. We wish all of our partners and friends the best as the fallout from these choices continue and are there to support them in whatever way we can afford.
So, back to this wine, one of our suppliers reached out to us with the story and got us a sample bottle back in January. We tasted it (complete with the French Canadian label on back and all) and decided it would fit nicely into our club. We get a fantastic wine at wine-club friendly prices and help someone at the same time - a rare win-win in a lose-lose situation.
Though his name is not on the label, we’d be remiss not to talk about the legend who made this wine - John Grochau. John started his foray into wine through an unlikely avenue - professional bike racing in France. He spent his formative years riding through some of the world’s best wine regions and presumably drinking a bit here and there. When John returned to his hometown of Portland, he turned to fine dining, where he worked as a server and sommelier for a decade and a half, most notably at Higgins. Like many in the service industry, his interest eventually moved to wine production. John got his start apprenticing with Erath and later became assistant winemaker to Doug Tunnel of Brick House Vineyards. In 2002, he struck out on his own and launched Grochau Cellars.
Unlike Hanson above, Grochau follows a negociant model of winemaking, where they purchase fruit rather than farm the vineyards themselves. This allows greater flexibility and a wide range of grapes without being tied up in the most expensive resource of all - land. At last count, they source from 19 different vineyards through the Willamette Valley. John ensures that all of his vineyard partners follow sustainable farming practices, something he believes in innately. In the cellar, the approach is similar - minimal intervention, native yeasts, and an effort to let the terroir shine through. The winery’s unofficial model is ‘Don’t Screw it Up” after all.
One other important note about Grochau is that their production space in Amity has also become sort of an incubator for other small wineries, most of which we carry. Currently Redolent, Arabalis, and Mendivia all operate from his facility. Colin of Mendivia is also Grochau’s Assistant Winemaker.
Ensemble is a blend of primarily Pinot Noir (just over half), Pinot Gris fermented with skin contact (⅓) and then small bits of Gamay and Pinot Blanc. These unlikely varieties come together and create a beautiful, springtime wine. The overall profile is a light, fresh red similar to Burgundy’s Passetoutgrains (traditional Pinot/Gamay blend). It shows notes of strawberry, wild cherry, rose petal, and herbs. There is a freshness and acidity on the palate that almost makes you feel like you’re drinking a heavy rose, however the aromatics and light tannin profile push it just into light red territory. It’s best drunk with a light chill (45-55 deg) and would go fantastic with all types of food - a harvest salad with salty cheese, fruit, nuts, and a light fruit dressing would be delightful!