Resonance

Résonance is Maison Louis Jadot's Oregon estate, and the first winery the Burgundy house has ever built outside Burgundy. It sits in the Willamette Valley, just west of the small town of Carlton, at the foot of the Coast Range.

The story is easy to tell because it is short and well documented. Pierre-Henry Gagey, president of Louis Jadot from 1992 to 2022, had been looking for a site in the New World since the early 2000s. In April 2013 his son Thibault and Jacques Lardière, who had just retired after leading winemaking at Jadot for forty-two vintages, went to look at an established Oregon vineyard called Résonance. They tasted through dozens of wines made from its fruit, and Lardière's verdict was one word: "Perfect." They bought it, kept the vineyard's name for the winery, and added the accent. Lardière came out of retirement to make the wine. Thibault Gagey has run the operation since. Since 2016 the winemaker has been Guillaume Large, a Burgundian from Pouilly-Fuissé who trained at the Jules Guyot Institute in Dijon and came to Oregon from Jadot's own cellars.

The Résonance Vineyard itself is the reason any of this happened. It is a 32-acre property on a low ridge running west to east out of the Coast Range, between 80 and 150 metres above sea level, on Willakenzie sedimentary and Yamhill basaltic soils, with 20 acres planted to Pinot Noir. Those vines went in on their own roots in 1981 and have never been grafted, they are dry-farmed, and they are certified organic. That makes it one of the oldest vineyards in the Willamette Valley and one of very few ungrafted ones anywhere in the New World. Own-rooted, dry-farmed old vines are the sort of thing Burgundians notice, and it is exactly what a French house was looking for.

There are now four estate vineyards, 139 acres across three of the valley's AVAs, planted 72% Pinot Noir and 28% Chardonnay. Jolis Monts sits next door in Yamhill-Carlton, planted in 2017. Découverte, meaning discovery, was the second purchase: fifteen certified organic, dry-farmed acres of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in the Dundee Hills, planted in 1996, on the red volcanic Jory soils that made that district famous. Koosah, the newest, is high up in the Eola-Amity Hills on basalt and old marine sediment.

The winemaking is deliberately unfussy and recognisably French. Grapes are picked by hand and fermented vineyard by vineyard, block by block, in separate tanks. The wines are not inoculated with cultured yeast, maceration length and temperature change with the vintage, and the wines then sit quietly in French oak barrels, racked perhaps once, until they are ready. The gravity-flow winery, built in 2018, stands among the vines of the Résonance Vineyard, so the fruit travels a few hundred metres from picking to press.

The Découverte Vineyard Pinot Noir and the Découverte Estate Chardonnay both come off the Dundee Hills site. The Résonance Vineyard Estate Pinot Noir is the wine from those 1981 own-rooted vines, and if you want to understand why a Burgundy house crossed the Atlantic, that is the one to open.