JamesSuckling Interviews: Chris Hermann, 00 Wines

JamesSuckling Interviews features innovative and influential winery owners, winemakers and industry notables representing the new generation that is shaping tastes, trends and techniques in the greater wine world. 

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First-generation Oregonian winemaker Chris Hermann has been immersed in the worlds of botany, ecological research and cross-cultural business since childhood. The son of the the late Dr. Richard Hermann, a renowned forestry and botany educator, Chris grew up in the Willamette Valley and spent decades at home and abroad talking to farmers and vintners about the land and dirt in which they worked, in part because of the family’s scientific endeavors, in part due to his work as a wine industry lawyer. Chris, his wife, Kathryn, and his father founded 00 wines in 2015 with a focus on connecting the famed chardonnays of Burgundy to homegrown ones in the Willamette Valley, and eventually branching out into Champagne. The winery produces sought-after chardonnay and pinot noir sourced from sustainably farmed vineyards in the Willamette Valley, plus small-lot projects from Grand Cru sites in Burgundy and Champagne.

Susan Kostrzewa recently talked with Chris (and Kathryn, who popped in for a question) about the uniqueness of spirit and terroir in Oregon, why everything old is new again in viticultural practice, how Burgundy helped him find the elusive “something” that completes world-class wines and why he feels perfectly poised for the future with his projects in Oregon and France.

Prior to the founding of 00 in 2015, you had a deep knowledge of Willamette terroir and vineyards. Why was making wine in general, and then initially in Oregon, personally appealing to you?

I’ve lived in Oregon most of my life, in the Willamette Valley. I was here as a young person when the wine industry began in the 1960s and ‘70s and have a long personal acquaintance with the development of the industry as well as a lot of the folks that were the pioneers, in part because my father was a professor in botany and forestry at Oregon State University, and together we spent time with many of them over the years. I also have a parallel career, which is as a wine industry lawyer, and I spent a lot of my time interacting with folks as their business and legal adviser. Through that lens, I had a unique opportunity to see kind of the reality of the wine industry, which isn't just fairy tales. There's a lot of hard work and blood, sweat and tears, but also a lot of opportunity for people who have vision and who have the drive to do something extraordinary.

So Oregon is in your blood.

The beauty of having our project start in Oregon is that it’s a place synonymous with pioneering discovery. For the last 150 years people have come here to see what kind of mark they could make on the world – what kind of a difference they could make. That's certainly been true of the Oregon wine industry and we're very excited to be a part of that. Our name “00” represents our two focuses, chardonnay and pinot, and in numerology it is the symbol for potential.

What were the viticultural reasons for focusing on the Willamette?

Oregon is a special place because it really epitomizes cool-climate winemaking country. We’re about 600 miles north of Napa and Sonoma and it's much cooler up here. That had actually been somewhat of a detriment for many decades but it’s warmed up to the point where we probably have the weather that Sonoma had back in the 1960s and ‘70s, and we have a nearly ideal balance between cool and a slightly warmer Mediterranean climate. In the Willamette in general, it's not too cold, not too rainy. And the winemaking pioneers here knew that.

Did any of those early producers particularly influence or inspire you?

There’s a winery called Evening Land Vineyard that's based in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA, which is a small AVA between McMinnville and Salem. It's really the coolest of the AVAs in the Willamette Valley, and Evening Land began producing chardonnay there in the early 2000s. I knew the original owner, Al McDonald. I was his lawyer. He planted Seven Springs Vineyard in 1980 with the idea that if you're going to try to make great chardonnay in addition to pinot noir, you have to draw the world's attention to Oregon chardonnay in the same way pinot noir became known. They brought in a very famous Burgundian winemaker [Dominique Lafon] to help focus on chardonnay and bring expertise, and as a result of that, they stated producing some absolutely fantastic chardonnays. Beyond quality, they demonstrated that people in the world were willing to pay significant dollars for those wines. People that were used to buying and drinking white Burgundy and other great wines began to take the Willamette Valley seriously.

What was your own initial goal when founding 00, which evolved to encompass Burgundian and Champagne projects in 2017 and 2020, respectively?

The central focus of our project and the motivation for starting it was our lifelong fascination with chardonnay and in particular the great white Burgundies and chardonnays that are produced in Burgundy and Chablis. Again, people have been making really fantastic pinot noir in Oregon since the late ‘60s and early ‘70s so pinot noir was quite obviously established, but chardonnay wasn’t a focal point for most of the producers. We came in with new ideas and a creative perspective on what an Oregon or Willamette chardonnay could be. We then decided to focus on three great regions globally that grow chardonnay: the Willamette Valley in Oregon, the Cote d'Or in Burgundy and the Cote de Blanc in Champagne. Our plan was to make Grand Cru- and Premier Cru-quality wine in those three areas, really drilling down on what the essence of the terroir in those three regions is and using a similar winemaking method for all three.

READ MORE OREGON 2025 TASTING REPORT: A ‘MIRACULOUS’ VINTAGE RAISES THE BAR IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

What has the experience been of producing wine, especially chardonnay, in these three distinct regions?

It really gives you kind a clear picture of the differences that are there just because of the terroir. But you can also see similarities because you're dealing with the same variety. And that's something that we're very excited about, is having a very clear signature in all of our chardonnays.

People often ask me why I am making wine in three different places. If you're really excited about making wine, to stand in one of the amazing vineyards we work with [Chambertin and Charmes-Chambertin for the reds, and Batard-Montrachet, Corton-Charlemagne and others for the whites] at 6:30am in September as the sun is rising over Burgundy is such a moving experience. You're standing in a place where people have made wine for a thousand years. It's like climbing in the Himalayas or South America. My family moved back and forth between the U.S. and Europe and so I'm comfortable moving between different cultures and worlds, and thrilled to be able to do this.

Kathryn has described the ’22 vintage in the Willamette as one producing wines especially poised for longevity. Can you talk about the cooler vintage conditions and how they resulted in the bright and electric wines such as the VGW and VGR, Seven Springs Chardonnay and beyond?

I think first we should talk about the overall character of the Eola-Amity Hills, which is where we buy most of the grapes that we produce. It’s a very cool-climate region because you have afternoon winds coming off of the Pacific and through the Van Duzer corridor. This keeps the temperatures cool on these warm summer afternoons that we have in the Willamette Valley. But also very importantly, it’s an area primarily known for its weathered, eroded, basaltic volcanic soil, which is something that you don't have in Burgundy, for instance.

Those minerals create a very clear signature of Oregon terroir in the chardonnays. We don't irrigate so the vines send their roots deep, and you're pulling up water into the vines that has dissolved those minerals and other compounds. It translates into wines that have tremendous vitality, a linear quality of minerality, electricity. They are a product of the Dijon clones that are planted there that were brought in in the ‘80s and ‘90s to Oregon, and that specific soil and the whole microclimate.

Moving onto the 2022 vintage, we’ve had relatively warm years since about 2010, but 2019 and  2022 gave us less conventionally warm conditions. And what we saw is that in years like that, we really focused on extracting tannins from the skins to showcase the special characteristics we have. We have lower alcohol levels in those cooler years. And you really see the specificity of the sites coming through in the flavors, in the aromatics and in the textures that in warmer years with higher alcohol can be slightly obscured.

Can you talk about your viticultural approaches in the Oregon vineyards in terms of sustainability?

It’s really more about the need to be flexible and open-minded. And in some cases, what we're seeing is that less technology is better. Some people are getting away from traditional, conventional mechanized farming practices that we've seen here and in other countries, whether it's irrigation or use of tractors, etc. We source from 10 different vineyards in the Willamette Valley, and there's really only one out of the 10 that is still farmed conventionally, so people have almost all moved to organic and in many cases, biodynamic practices. That's been a huge change. 20 years ago, that wasn't the case.

Our view is we're not we're not dogmatic. What want to make the best possible wine that we can from the very best grapes we can, which usually come out of the very best vineyards. The people who we work with allow us to have very considerable input into what they're doing and how they're doing it. For the most part, that does involve biodynamic farming. You know the plants, you're not at a distance. You become part of that environment yourself.

What new technologies are you employing in the vineyard?

The recent technology we've been exploring is essentially doing electromagnetic investigations of the subsurface of the soil. Pedro Parra is a very famous Chilean soil scientist and a leading advocate of this. Vineyards in Oregon tend to be smaller, so let’s say you have a 20-acre vineyard. Instead of just viewing that as a whole, you do the subsurface analysis, and say, determine areas of higher concentration of volcanic soils which you provide the best possible micro-environment for producing the best possible grapes. You can isolate those blocks and vinify them separately. It’s groundbreaking but it’s not a panacea – it's not going to answer all your questions. But technology like that can help you understand your immediate growing environment better and potentially allow you to identify areas that should be managed differently in terms of viticulture and ultimately harvested and vinified separately. Those are all very positive things.

It sounds like flexibility is your ethos.

It’s a process of trying to be open to things and then experimenting. An example is that a lot of people are no longer plowing their vineyards. They no longer compact things. Their rows are full of 15 different varieties of plants, flowers, legumes and grains to create a much more diverse environment We have a three-acre block that is just this forest of different kinds of plants, animals and insects in addition to the grapevines. And we're getting fantastic fruit from that. But does that mean that every single vineyard should be like that? Not necessarily. Both of my parents were research scientists – my mother was a pharmaceutical scientist and worked with plants to turn them into different pharmaceutical compounds – so I spent my childhood watching people just constantly experimenting, having controls, checking things out and always having a thesis, but then proving it. And that's really been our approach all along.

What have you learned from having projects in both Oregon and France?

I spent a lot of time in Europe in the wine world, and when we were envisioning 00 Wines, our basic question was, “Is excellence just a function of terroir or is it terroir plus ‘something’”? And if it's “plus something,” what's that “something” and what are the options for the “something?” The answer we kept getting from people in Burgundy was that it goes beyond terroir and everybody had their own idea about what that “something” was in terms of viticulture and winemaking. In Burgundy, they have very specific things they're doing to achieve their goals and don’t buy into a rigid formula. That said, heavy extraction of phenolic compounds from the skins has influenced many great white Burgundies. It’s not typical of what people have historically done in the Willamette Valley or in the United States. We decided to try this and took bits and pieces of how people were doing things in Burgundy and then applied them here.

On the flip side, we’ve influenced Burgundians who have tasted our pinot noir and loved the aromatics in the fermentation process that we use. It’s been exciting to see those superlative aromatic characteristics coming through in the wines that we are making over there. But overall, because of the upbringing I had with my parents and my own life experience being connected to nature in Oregon, we were able to connect all of these approaches and create wines that are relatively consistent. They are the end product of my own thinking, approach and day-to-day involvement.

What do you consider the biggest future challenge for 00, as well as for Willamette and Oregon wine? 

For us, it’s the cost of doing what we do. For example, for our pinot noir, we use a method that I call the berry snipping method. So when the pinot noir comes in, we take each cluster and we snip every single berry at its pedestal off of the stem or the main stem. We have intact pinot noir berries. Then we put them into Italian clay amphora and ferment them there. It takes a team of about 15 people 5 to 6 hours to snip off enough berries to fill one amphora. We have 16 amphorae. We go through those a couple of times for each harvest, so it's enormously time consuming. I pay those people $25 an hour to do it. It's very expensive, but it produces a wine that I am really excited about. However, I can't charge $20 a bottle for that wine because it would be impossible to sell. It’s just weighing all of those factors. You have to look at what you want to do, how you want to do it and how does that fit together with the economics of the business? It’s just Kathryn and me running things at this point. We're an asset-light company. We don't own vineyards. We don't own a winery. We focus on making the best possible wine we can.

The other challenge is climate change. I think everyone's grappling with it. But one of the fantastic things about being in the Willamette Valley and particularly with chardonnay, is we have an opportunity to make absolutely stunning wine, even in circumstances of increasing temperatures during the growing season.

What’s your feeling about the potential of chardonnay and pinot noir, not only in Oregon and France but overall?

When we go out on these business trips, I pour 10 wines for people and I see that people are gravitating toward the chardonnays more. The chardonnays sell immediately before the pinots, though the pinots are still selling. They say that while 20 years ago they would have just drunk red wine, they are now drinking at least as much white as reds, and in many cases, more white than red. That’s a fantastic opportunity we have being here in the Willamette Valley and also in Burgundy and Champagne. People are also drinking reds that are lighter, less alcoholic, more elegant and with finesse. And that's certainly the opportunity that you have with Oregon pinot noir. There’s a bright future for both varieties.

Kathryn, hello! Since your background is technology, can you talk about how you’ve brought your own innovations into the family business?

[Katherine:] The global economy is changing. It's getting faster. People are global citizens. They're traveling, they like to enjoy food and wine all over the world, and they want it to come from a very specific place. I think that wine consumers of all ages are changing how they're ordering, buying and shipping their wine, so we’ve been implementing approaches like text messaging. There’s a company called Red Chip that we're using where I can use AI data to surface my very best customers or people who would be interested in very specific wines and then send them specific offers, and they can reply to me with a simple Y or N, or a number with how many bottles they want. And then I can use the e-commerce software program Commerce Seven to just automatically, within a few seconds, process their order. So text messaging has been very revolutionary for us. I'm really happyto be utilizing tools that will help me get back to people faster and to really use data to understand what our wine drinkers want. It’s not replacing that personal touch. It actually helps me scale that personal touch directly from myself and Chris to our customers.

– Susan Kostrzewa