Utopia Vineyard

Utopia Harvest Almanac – 2007

2007 was a special year and vintage for us as it was the first time since we started our vineyard that we were in Oregon full time and living in our new house at the vineyard.

The year started out like 2006 with warm weather and a good flowering, but, then unlike 2006 became cool and cloudy in July and August with below average temperatures. The relative humidity was also higher than normal this year which created a lot of additional mildew infection pressure on the vineyard. The vineyard crews had to work much harder this year to keep our fruit clean and unspoiled.

Based on the weather forecast we elected to take advantage of a short break in the rain on Monday morning October 1st to bring in 10 tons of very clean fruit. From these 10 tons we produced 550 cases of the 2006 Utopia Pinot Noir. It’s big and well structured at this stage with cherry, berry, vanilla aromas and flavors complimented with toasty oak notes and a hint of black pepper.Full Text … (.PDF - 493K)

Greetings

We are very pleased to invite you to our Memorial Weekend open house party. To honor the occasion we will be tasting our 2005 Estate Utopia Pinot Noir, and other select wines in our tasting room located right on Main St. in Carlton, Oregon. The $10 tasting fee includes a special commemorative Utopia Riedel Burgundy glass, 4 wines and an assortment of bread and cheeses.We hope that you can join us for the fun!

Directions to the event can be found on the Contacts page

Cheers,
-Dan
www.utopiawine.com

Utopia Harvest Almanac – 2006

We completed the 2006 Harvest on September 29th and all I can say is what a difference a year makes! Compared to 2005 the 2006 growing season was nearly ideal with most vineyards coming in with higher than normal yields. After dropping 30% to 40% of our fruit, the Utopia vineyard still brought in a whopping Nine (9) tons of ripe fruit exhibiting beautiful color and lovely aromatics. Just as in 2005 all of the 2006 fruit for Utopia came from our original 2002 4 acre planting of Dijon and Pommard clones. Our entire vineyard is dry farmed by hand using organic farming methods that eliminate all pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.

The windfall of the 2006 harvest also provided us with enough fruit to separate the different clones for the first time. This year we have separate barrels with Pommard, Swan and Wadensville and a blend of 667, 777 and 115 topped off with the remaining Pommard, Yummy!!!Full Text … (.PDF - 1MB)

We are very excited to invite you to our release party for our debut vintage, the 2005 Utopia Pinot Noir - Estate. To honor the occasion we are having a pre-release tasting in our new tasting room in Carlton, Oregon that includes a special commemorative Utopia glass and lots of great hors d’ oeuvres. We hope that you can join us for the celebration!

November 25th and 26th. Directions to the event can be found on the Contacts page

It is an exciting time indeed at Utopia Vineyards, after more than 5 years of planning and developing our vineyard we have recently bottled our debut wine, the 2005 Estate Grown Utopia Pinot Noir.With the release of our first wine I’d to like provide some background on our history and tell you more about our exciting debut vintage.

Our story began in 2000 with the purchase of our 16+ acre vineyard site on Ribbon Ridge Road 6.5 miles southwest of Newberg, Oregon located in northern Willamette Valley. In 2001 our company, Utopia Wines, LLC was formed and in 2002 we planted our initial 4 acres. This initial planting consisted of young vines from the nursery, 6 different Dijon and Pommard clones of approximately 1,000 vines per vineyard block. At that time Ribbon Ridge was not yet designated as an Appellation by the American Viticulture Association. Our site was formerly a horse pasture on which nothing had ever previously been grown, but, we were confident of its potential as a great vineyard site based on its location, soils, slope and elevation. Our goal has always been a single minded focus to produce a world class Pinot Noir that exhibits the unique characteristics of our vineyard. Utopia wine is sourced solely from the Utopia vineyard so you always know the exact origin of the fruit that goes into each and every bottle of Utopia wine.

Being the grower, producer and bottler of our wines guarantees that you will receive the highest quality wine attainable. If the 2005 vintage is any indication we are off to an excellent beginning. The wine is deeply concentrated with plum and black cherry fruit, cassis and nice toasted oak flavors with a long finish. The wine is well balanced and shows superb cellaring capability.

We hope you will enjoy our debut wine! Cheers!

Daniel Warnshuis
Owner

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