NEWBERG, Ore. — Recent summer wildfires have devastated many Oregon wineries, leaving the local wine industry with tainted grapes and unsellable wine. Now one Newburg winery has teamed up with a distiller and found a creative use for the smoke-filled grapes. Instead of throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wine, they turned it into whiskey.
Jim Anderson, owner of Patricia Green Cellars in Newberg, recalled that he began the summer of 2020 full of anticipation for a bountiful wine season. The 2020 Vintage was coming along nicely, and it was looking to be another early harvest in Oregon. But the anticipation quickly turned into fear.
"The fires start," he said. "You couldn't see the top of our vineyard from the bottom of it."
The 2020 Labor Day wildfires destroyed more than a million acres. The Oregon Department of Transportation called the blaze the most destructive wildfire in state history.
"For over around two weeks, we had some of the worst air quality index in the world," Anderson said.
The Patricia Green Cellars property was spared, and after the smoke cleared, Anderson tried to get back to business — but he quickly found that there were a lot of pieces to pick up.
"We knew from California and Australia fires that smoke and grapes are a bad thing, but we didn't know exactly what we're getting into," he said. "We had at around twelve to fourteen thousand gallons of wine that in our in our view, was not potable and was not sellable."
The wine tasted terrible, and Anderson said he didn't know what to do. But as fate would have it, he met distiller and Corvallis native Lynsee Sardell, who had some ideas for new possibilities.
"I'm not really interested in being constrained by what other people have done or haven't done," Sardell said.
Together, they turned the wine into whiskey.
"I knew that through distilling, I could extract some very beautiful parts of the wine that was made, and then extract out the pieces that were tainted by smoke," Sardell explained.
The first step was to try to prove that the wine could be distilled into brandy — "then use that as the scaffolding to pair single varietals of barley whiskey into a blend that would make up a structure of a whiskey that is tasty, delicious and reflective Oregon," Sardell said. "To be able to make something that's representative of this landscape is just a privilege."
The duo created two innovative whiskeys called Multifarious and Purple Karma Pinnacle.
"Taking something old, something damaged, something broken and finding another home for it, another use for it, another life for it," Anderson said.
The whiskey is currently exclusively sold at Patricia Green Cellars. There are future plans to expand into Oregon bars, restaurants and stores.