Château Lorane Winery

After visiting King Estate we decided to head a little further south to Château Lorane.  My sister and brother-in-law had been to this winery a number of times.  They have attended the annual Memorial Day weekend event several times and so know the winery fairly well. 

Which was good.  This is a winery in transition and everything felt rather unorganized the day we visited.  Our tasting room experience was presided over by the winemaker himself, although he had not actually made any of the wines we were tasting.  I’m sorry that I do not know his name so I will only be able to refer to him as the winemaker.  Apparently this gentleman has a family winery in France but came to Oregon to work at some wineries here, both to see what’s going on and also to look into importing some of his family wines into the U.S. 

His original plan was to spend the harvest with another winery in the area, Hinman/Silvan Ridge, which he did.  When he was preparing to return to France the winemaker position at Château Lorane was suddenly vacated and he moved into the position early this year.  At least that’s what I understand.  Although, his English was pretty good I could tell he was working to say exactly what he meant and his accent was heavy so it was sometimes I bit hard to understand everything he said. 

Since the winemaker had been there such a short time he really wasn’t all that familiar with the wines we were tasting.  I would have liked to know more about them since this winery seemed to have a policy of holding wines a couple of years longer before release.  (We were tasting 1999 – 2001 vintages.) They also had a very wide range of wines with some varieties not commonly found in this area.  I’m not going to attempt tasting notes since I feel there is too great a chance I would be incorrect about something.  I will say that at the current time they have a 1999 Pinot Gris that was very nice, if a bit on the sweet side, that they were selling for $8!  The winemaker also mentioned that they have a line of mead!  It is not yet available as the labels are still in the approval stage.  He seemed very excited about this line. 

Next time I’m in this area I would visit again to see what’s going on with the winery and if the winemaker is still there or if they’ve had additional turnover.  The jury is still out on this winery! :-)