Wine for wine, Oregon Pinot Noir is more ageable than any in California. Oregon’s colder winters, late springs, warm, rain-free summers and cool fall temperatures all serve to restrain fruit ripeness levels, giving the wines more tension, a lower pH, higher acidity, a leaner fruit profile, and a tighter structural weave. Of course, a lighter-skinned Pinot won’t usually have the tannin payload or the aging window of, say, a California Cabernet, but in both Chardonnays and Pinot Noir, as well as its dry, racy, unsung Riesling—you’ll be impressed by the liveliness and integrity of Oregon wines as they age.

A lot of the OGs of Oregon’s wine industry—producers like Cristom, Bethel Heights, Adelsheim, Ponzi, Cameron, Domaine Drouhin, King Estate and the region’s first, The Eyrie—could easily make this list. All have a track record and cellar legacies that can be measured in decades. But in their picking decisions, their cellar practices, their attention to everything from reduction to release dates, the wineries below have a deliberate commitment to their wines’ aging potential; and as we’ll see, in many cases that commitment has its roots in the Old World.

Bergstrom 

The Bergstrom family started their winery in 1999, and for about a dozen years Josh Bergstrom made his Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays in a robust style—rich wines with soft shoulders. Were they ageable? That’s debatable. But in 2011, while waiting out a very late harvest, Bergstrom flew to Burgundy (where his wife Caroline is from) and observed the harvest underway. There he saw his heroes, like Etienne Sauzet, Bernard Moreau, and Jean-Marc Roulot, picking far earlier than he’d ever done, well before the fruit flavors were fully manifest. 

Bergstrom was so impressed with the strategy (and the resulting wines) that he adopted the selfsame approach to vinegrowing and winemaking. Now an estate winery, he’s converted all of his family’s vineyards to biodynamics; now, come harvest, he picks fruit and makes wines based on their potential, focusing more on acidity and flavor maturity than ‘fruit’ per se. His wines teem with potential energy and tension, vibrant textures, tremendous depth of flavor and length—making them a natural for aging, none more so than Sigrid, his meticulous, monumental flagship Chardonnay.

Lingua Franca 

Even among Master Sommeliers, Larry Stone is legendary. Stone, who became only the ninth Master Sommelier in the U.S. in 1988, has been a student of the world’s wines for most of his adult life. He has managed some of the country’s greatest restaurant collections, taught and mentored literally dozens of esteemed  sommeliers and wine professionals in the country, including Rajat Parr, Rob Renteria, Christie Dufault, and Shelley Lindgren. His mentees refer to him as “The Dean.” No one has a broader frame of reference for making wine in Oregon. 

LS Estate is the backbone of the Lingua Franca production, a sensational, unforgiving piece of vineyard land, a sloping parcel he used to gaze at from across Lone Star Road while at the adjacent Evening Land Vineyards, which he managed. Purchased in 2012, Stone assembled a winemaking team for the ages, including Dominique Lafon and Thomas Savre. 

Stone no longer owns Lingua Franca—Constellation bought the estate in 2022—but he remains its ambassador and guiding force. And both Savre and Lafon remain involved. As for the wines, they’ve been built to age since the brand’s inception, which should come as no surprise with an M.S. and a Burgundy maestro at the helm. In fact I’d venture that Lingua Franca wines will be among Oregon’s longest lived, period.

Nicolas Jay

Yet another winery with French pedigree, Nicolas Jay, established in 2013, features a partnership between Jay Boberg, founder of I.R.S. records, and his friend (and Burgundy legend) Jean-Nicolas Meo, one of the masters of Vosne-Romanée. The full scope of this venture is still playing out, with new vineyards in development and a new winery to break in. The team has been building a suite of wines with  fruit purchased from an A-List of vineyards as the team develops and gets to know their estate vineyards: Bishop Creek in Yamhill-Carlton, planted in 1988, and the Nicolas Jay Estate, a new planting in the Dundee Hills.

Meo makes visits throughout the year, for harvest, and to build and blend the wines; they’re also shipped to his team in Vosne-Romanée so he and they can keep tabs. Meo is skilled in bringing balance into the bottle; these are early days, but these wines already possess succulence without richness; tasted young, they inevitably make you think you should have waited.

Ovum

In a state industry dominated by red wines, the principal obsession of John and Ksenija Kostic House is white varieties. It so happens that some of Oregon’s oldest vineyards are planted to Riesling and Gewürztraminer, some forty and even fifty year old vines. The Houses have locked up contracts up and down the state, including in southern Oregon, where a great deal of historical plantings remain. 

Ovum has, for now, two tiers; the gluggable Big Salt collection of blends, rosés, and orange wines, and Ovum. These the Houses build for aging, sun-filled, rich, balanced, and exceedingly complex, most of them from old Riesling and Gewürztraminer vineyards which are subjected to different formats, wine-styles and approaches, like the joyous dry Gewürztraminer they bottle from Gerber Vineyard (the wine name changes every year—the 2023 is called “Music for Lovers”) and Cedar Ranch Vineyard Riesling Off the Grid. Minimally handled, the Houses employ large format oak and acacia casks from Austria, Slovenia, and France, as well as used barrels and the occasional concrete egg. 

Resonance

Resonance is owned and operated by the Burgundy negociant Louis Jadot, who sought expansion in the U.S. in the early 2000s. It seems fitting somehow that the company settled on Resonance, in Oregon’s Yamhill-Carlton District, since that project represented a new chapter for the great Jacques Lardière, Jadot’s Chef de Cave and leading light for some 42 years. Lardière had just retired, only to unretire for the new project. (Lardière is now winemaker emeritus.) 

Thibeault Gagey, scion of the Jadot enterprise, now runs the estate, a complex geological site which combines both volcanic elements and sedimentary soil types. Guillaume Large, another Burgundy native and Jadot’s former technical director, oversees winemaking. In his estate wines, Large manages to strike a balance between the exuberant freshness inherent in Yamhill-Carlton fruit and a kind of Burgundian structural reserve, ensuring a long cellar life—you need only consult the Jadot in your own cellar for reference.

Walter Scott

Ken Pahlow and Erica Landon were young when they started Walter Scott Wines in Amity, Oregon (the name draws together the names of two of Pahlow’s deceased relatives, a grandfather and nephew). But they’d packed in a lot of experience leading up to that point. Erica served as one of Portland’s most esteemed sommeliers where, in several restaurants, she amassed enviable Oregon verticals. Ken studied winemaking and then brand development in important Oregon cellars, notably St. Innocent, Patricia Green, and later Evening Land Vineyards, where he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Dominique Lafon and other Burgundian eminences. 

They now make 16 single-vineyard wines. Their Chardonnays are made in a reductive, Burgundian style with a fierce savory character, and are among the most age-worthy of anyone’s in Oregon. Meanwhile their Pinot Noirs are routinely thrilling, usually bolstered by some measure of whole cluster fermentations, with expressive midpalate textures that deepen and become more refined with cellar time.