Fullerton Wines - Portland, Oregon Pt. 1

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past hour at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, we look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike.

Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is, oh, you've heard the expression, and the grass is always greener. Well, the grass is always greener in Willamette Valley. It grows more turf and forage grasses than anywhere else in the world. Eric Asimov of The New York Times calls Willamette Valley the country's most exciting wine area. It's a favored destination for whitewater rafting and home to; this is Alex Fullerton of Fullerton wine. I am the co-owner and winemaker. All right, Alex, give us a little history on how Fullerton wine came about. So my dad, his best friend, inherited his grandpa's wine cellar. So he grew up driving down to Burgundy and Bordeaux with old bottles and but mainly his best friend, my godfather, ended up starting a wine importation company in Denmark. I was born in Denmark. My mom is Swedish. My dad was born in California to an American dad and a Danish mom. Long story; my dad kind of got me into wine. So when I was graduating high school, he ended up taking me on a trip to Burgundy Champagne and Cognac. And we picked up one of my best friends from Denmark, him and his dad. We picked them up at the airport drive to Burgundy. I just fell in love with how different the wines were. And all lot of story short, I stood too close to this guy. He had the contagious wine bug. And I caught that since he's a big fan of wine, he kind of shocked me with some more affordable stuff throughout college. So I'm kind of started home brewing, had a little bit of a bootlegging operation going. My roommates and I got into fermentation that way. I was graduating with an Econ degree, was tasting at Penner-Ash and got a job in the wine industry, and just fell in love with everything about the industry.

Ok, since you are the winemaker at Fullerton Wines, let's get your degree background. I originally got an economics degree from the University of Oregon.

But then I ended up getting a job at Penner-Ash, fell in love with the industry, worked in New Zealand for a bit, worked at Bergström Wines, then ended up deciding to go back to school at Oregon State with a bitter rival. So I'm a rare platypus, which is a beaver and a duck. Then I'm going back to school for viticulture and technology, which is grape growing and winemaking. You've got a huge selection of wines at Fullarton Wines, but which one is your most popular? So are three. Five FACES Pinot Noir, Lux Chardonnay, and The three Otter's Pinot Noir, are a blend of vineyards from throughout the Winery Valley. And that's our most popular wine. I guess if you look at production and that is something special about us too, is we don't make all the wines the same. So we like to optimize each vineyard, and we do a lot of different production techniques with experiments. Sometimes the experiments work out, and then we move in that direction. Sometimes we don't like it as much to move away from that direction. The wines get a huge diversity of different things while still maintaining what it is to be a well, even if you are, which is a little bit lighter, easy, approachable, but still with lots of flavors, some spice, and earthiness, and then red tones sometimes leading into a little bit of darkness, but generally a redder aspect to the fruit profile. And that is what we're going for.

Alright, Boys and girls, it’s our listener voicemail, Hi Forrest, this is Brad from North Carolina; my buddies and I are sitting around drinking a couple of boxes of wine. I don't know what the hell kind of unit you're running here. I just want to know why is wine stored on its side? That's a good question, Brad. No, it's not because the wine is tired. For the wine to last, the cork has got to stay moist. So putting it on its side keeps the cork moist. All right, Brad, you and your buddies can go back to pound in that box. Wine. It's time to party. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM if you like the show please tell your friends and pets and subscribe, until next time or the one and ponder your next adventure.

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