By
John Schmitz
Western Correspondent
It was love at
first sight when Joe Olexa walked the historic slopes of the 43-acre
parcel of land up for sale in the Ankeny Hill area just south of Salem,
Ore.
“I found this place and didn’t want to look anymore,”
said Olexa. “I fell in love with it instantly.”
One thing that attracted Olexa to the site is its history. Tom and
Martha Cox, an Ind. couple who journeyed to Oregon’s Willamette
Valley in 1846 with 11 wagonloads of goods, homesteaded the land.
The Cox’s weathered gravestones are among the oldest of any
white settlers in the entire Pacific Northwest, and now protrude from
a tiny pioneer cemetery adjacent to the highest point on Olexa’s
property.
Like most small wine growers/makers in Ore. will tell you, he advises
people who want to make a small fortune in the wine business to start
with a large one.
A native Pennsylvanian, Olexa planted his first wine grapes, a small
block of Pinot noir, two years after moving to the site and clearing
some of the land. Four years later he sold his first crop to several
Willamette Valley wineries.
At first Olexa, who continued working for 20 years in the legal profession
while growing his dream, was intent on just raising grapes. Then he
realized that he’d be much better off adding a winery. His first
vintage under the Ankeny Vineyard label was in 1986, one year after
his vines began producing at a commercial level.
Aside from the fact that it offers a spectacular view of the central
Coast Range 30 miles west, Olexa’s 31-acre vineyard is unique
in other ways.
A combination of gentle slopes and low elevations makes it one of
the earliest ripening sites in the Willamette Valley. The vineyard
is close enough to the valley floor that it allows the grapes to bathe
in maximum summer heat, yet the steepness of the south-facing slopes
shunts cold spring air and frosts away from the grapes as it rolls
down onto the grass seed fields and the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge
below.
Olexa grows primarily two wine grape varieties, Oregon’s signature
Pinot noir, and its white Burgundian cousin, Pinot gris, the latter
now Oregon’s number two wine after replacing Chardonnay. He
also grows about an acre of Marechal Foch, one of the first varietals
to be harvested in the state.
Ankeny Vinyard’s Pinot noir grapes sell for around $2,000 a
ton; the Pinot gris goes for $1,300 a ton.
Unlike most other winegrape growers in Ore., Olexa is not concerned
about the deadly disease Phylloxera, an aphid-like pest that wreaked
havoc in France and California and has since invaded Oregon to a limited
extent.
While other vineyards now plant Phylloxera-resistant grafted stock,
Olexa plans to plant only own-rooted stock in a new Pinot noir block
going in this year.
Requiring a lot of site prep, the new block is turning out to be a
costly venture.
“I’m already calling it the El Dorado Block,” Olexa
said. “ I figure by the time I get it planted and the deer fence
around it and get some wine made, I’ll have to sell a case of
wine for the equivalent of an ounce of gold.”
Since more is not better when it comes to growing Pinot noir grapes,
Olexa crops this varietal at around two tons per acre.
“To do that you have to drop about half the fruit,” he
said.
He does this with pruning, shoot thinning and cluster thinning.
“There’s a lot of handwork with Pinot noir,” he
said.
After several back-to-back bountiful years, it appears that the winegrape
crop will be lighter than usual this year due to a weak fruit set.
“There are a lot of empty clusters,” Olexa said. “We
had a really cold May.”
That nipped a lot of buds that broke early due to an unseasonable
warm March and April.
“They’re now calling it early bud narcosis,” Olexa
said. “It looks like it could be a small crop, but that could
make for pretty good wine with better flavor.”
For most other crops this would be bad news, but for Pinot noir this
actually saves time and money on holding back the yields.
Ankeny Vineyard is also somewhat unique in that it is one of the few
organic wine growing operations in the state, and soon to be certified
by Oregon Tilth. Rather than apply herbicides Olexa prefers to stir
up the soil and mulch with grass seed straw, which there is plenty
of every summer in the valley.
Though much of his ground is qualified but not yet certified, Olexa
plans on having Oregon Tilth do the honors soon.
He feels that the resulting healthier soils, rich in beneficial insects,
are better able to fend off pests, such as phylloxera.
“If you’ve got a happy grape, you’ve got a better
wine,” he said.
One disadvantage of parts of Olexa’s vineyard, which ranges
in elevation from 240 feet above sea level to 370, is the rich, sandy/clayey
soil found in the lower elevations.
“I have to cope with a lot of vigor,” Olexa said.
At higher elevations the more friable, volcanic soils do not present
this problem.
With his twentieth harvest due this fall, Olexa said he’s pretty
much learned how to grow a good wine grape.
“I’ve got a pretty good handle on growing the grapes,
but making the wine is a whole different story,” Olexa said.
One of Oregon’s smaller wineries, normally Olexa sells about
75 percent of his grapes to other wineries in the state. The other
25 percent is made into estate wines that move through his tasting
room and local outlets. He plans on making 2-3,000 cases from his
2004 crop, and was still looking for a buyer for some of his grapes
in mid-July.
“There are a lot of grapes that are going to go unsold,”
Olexa said.
Olexa dedicates a small part of his Pinot noir crush to his constant
companion, a chocolate lab named Hershy. The Hershy’s Red vintage
is offered sooner than other Pinot noir’s, in the spring of
the following year.
Where did the desire to grow wine come from?
“I tell people it came to me in a period of high fever,”
said Olexa, who still has not recaptured all of the costs involved
with building his operation.
“Look into Christmas trees” is his advice to people contemplating
planting winegrapes.
“Basically, you have to do it out of the love of doing it,”
he said. “Financially, it doesn’t pencil out.”
The exception to that is winegrowers who have a lot of income from
other sources, he said.
“Then it becomes a nice tax write-off,” he said.
