Oregon 2025 Tasting Report: A ‘Miraculous’ Vintage Raises the Bar

Winemakers everywhere have an understandable rationale for highly touting the vintage they’re currently selling, often declaring it to be of “great quality,” “exceptional” or “distinctive.” In fact, they use the term “vintage of the century” suspiciously often in some particularly confident appellations of the world.

So we don’t begrudge Oregon winemakers their characterization of the 2022 harvest in the American northwest as a miracle vintage. It is the year featured in a large portion of the 778 Oregon wines – mainly pinot noir and chardonnay –  included in this annual report.

Our tasting notes and scores offer plenty of evidence that’s it’s an excellent, high-quality year. Twenty-four pinot noirs in the notes below rated 96 points and higher, and one 2022 chardonnay earned a nearly perfect score.

Yet what made the year miraculous was not so much its consistently high quality, but it’s dramatic, perhaps unprecedented recovery from devastating weather conditions in the springtime. Bitter, freezing temperatures killed new, growing grapevine shoots and the tiny, infant grape clusters on them in large swaths of the Willamette Valley, which sits in the northwestern part of the state.

Grapevines keep trying, however, and they eventually pushed out new shoots and clusters.

“The secondary buds didn’t come out for four to six weeks after freeze,” said winemaker Brian Laing of Hazelfern Cellars.

But would the vines get an extra month or more in the fall to ripen this second crop before the usual cold, wet weather set in?

“We were afraid in 2022 that we wouldn’t even get the fruit ripe, but in the end I think we got more ripeness than in ’21,” Laing said. Winemaker after winemaker said that the way the late summer and fall weather favored them was amazing.

Ian Lombard, the cofounder of Rose & Arrow Estate, which made numerous pinot noirs scoring 96 and above in that vintage, called 2022  “miraculous.”

“It was a cooler year even after the frost,” Lombard said. “Everything was delayed. But we got a warm dry Indian summer in September that extended until almost the end of October.

He added: “We picked during the last week of September, when normally it would be the last week of August or first of September. In the end we got good maturity at lower temperature than usual.”

Winemakers from many of the big names known for exceptional wines concurred. Producers whose 2022s scored especially high include Antica Terra, Soter, 00 Wines, Domaine Serene, Nicolas Jay and Rose & Arrow, and others. More than half of the reds, mostly pinot noir, were from 2022, and almost exactly half of the whites, mostly chardonnay, were also 2022s.

Results below include 50-plus reds from 2021 and 160 from 2023, to give a good, solid preview of the latter vintage, which will be dominating winery offerings in the later months of this year.

Wines like the perennially outstanding Soter Pinot Noir Yamhill-Carlton Mineral Springs are exceptional in 2022 and balanced for further aging. Its fresh, vivid fruit flavors ride an electric wave of bracing acidity from the first whiff to the long, lingering finish.

In fact, the balance between vibrant acidity, tempting flavors and substantive textures in a wide range of wines was our most impressive takeaway. It’s nothing new, since Willamette Valley pinot noir makers in particular have prided themselves on an elegant style of wine since I began professionally tasting them 40 years ago.

But along the way producers like Beaux Freres, Domaine Serene and others went for more richness, ripeness and the use of more new oak barrels in aging. Mikey Etzel, the son of Beaux Freres founding winemaker Mike Etzel, confirmed that when the winery started 30 years ago, it preferred small yields, peak ripeness and 100 percent new French oak barrels from Francois Freres – but it has significantly dialed back these measures.

Etzel poured an aged wine from their cellar, the Beaux Freres Pinot Noir Ribbon Ridge Beaux Freres Vineyard 2015, showing that the more elegant approach of today dates back at least that far. It offers great complexity, focus and freshness, has aged gracefully and potentially has a long way to go. And the 2023 version of that same wine echoes the quality and elegance of the 2015.

READ MORE WASHINGTON 2025 TASTING REPORT: WINEMAKING WITHOUT COMPROMISE

When asked to compare the quality of the 2022 and 2023 vintages, Beaux Freres winemaker Damien Lapuyade said that “long term, ’22 is better in quality, and gives more acidity and less over-ripeness,” while 2023, “is better in the short term, generous and open in expression, and will find its sweet spot in two or three years, where ’22 will take five years to hit its sweet spot.”

At the highly regarded Shea Vineyard in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA, general manager Peter Shea sells grapes from their 150 planted acres to 17 wineries but uses about 20 percent of the fruit for the family’s Shea Cellars brand.  Shea, who has been around the family business since he was a young boy, said of 2022: “It was a vintage that went from us thinking it was going to be a disaster to a vintage that was practically miraculous. I’ve never seen an October like that in my 30 years in Oregon.”

Shea said the weather became warm and dry at the beginning of October and then continued warming to around 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29.4 Celsius) at harvest.

For fans of California wine, the outcome of 2022 in Oregon doesn’t jibe with what happened in Napa and Sonoma that year. California had a stunning heat dome in the early part of September with extremely high temperatures that literally cooked a good portion of the grapes, mostly reds.

Most of Oregon is just far enough to the north and cut off by mountain ranges to have experienced different, cooler weather patterns. The late summer heat in the Willamette Valley manifested as a good thing that gently ripened the grapes into October. A great example of this phenomenon is the Antica Terra Chardonnay Willamette Valley Abeona 2022, which shows lavish marzipan, poached pear, toasted almond and honey flavors.

Antica Terra owner-winemaker Maggie Harrison and assistant winemaker Mimi Adams say no rules apply when they blend from their barrels each year. While many of their colleagues are going for racy acidity and less new oak in their wines, they don’t mind richness or complex oak character.

In addition to several of the well-established names above, we highly recommend trying exciting new releases from relative newcomers like Hazelfern, White Walnut, Ayoub and others you’ll find in the tasting notes.

Hazelfern was started by Brian and Laura Laing in 2014, and Laura Laing said their 4,000-case production winery in the Chehalem Mountains American Viticultural Area “aims for younger drinkers who want less alcohol, not the rich wines that they used to drink or their parents did. We’ve gotten away from the perception of sweetness.”

Their Pinot Noir Laurelwood District Three Cedars Vineyard 2022 offers beautiful rose petal, cedar and spicy raspberries on a lively texture. The Hazelfern Pinot Noir Willamette Valley Prime Cut 2022 also scored highly, but this blend of top lots harvested in different parts of the valley is warmer, more generous and, they say, more ageworthy.

In the Dundee Hills just west of the town of Newberg, the owner-winemaker of the White Walnut winery, Chris Mazepink, said that he is the only producer in Oregon that focuses completely on Dundee pinot noir and chardonnay.

Mazepink uses grapes from his own 15 acres of vines that abut Domaine Drouhin and Archery Summit, and sources from other vineyards within a 1.5-mile radius. This neighborhood is a great one, judging from two White Walnut 2023 pinot noirs we rated highly as well as the equally high-scoring White Walnut Estate Chardonnay Dundee Hills White Walnut Vineyard 2023.

Mazepink made White Walnut’s first vintage in 2018 after working with well over 100 vineyards for many years, including Benton Lane, Archery Summit and others. He observed that chardonnay amounts to less than 10 percent of the grapes in Willamette Valley but Dundee Hills is an ideal AVA for this white Burgundy grape variety.

“Great pinot noir can come from different soils, but great chardonnay can only come from volcanic soils,” which his vineyards are set on. “The number of exceptional islands in the vast ocean of world chardonnay is very, very small but I think this happens to be one of them.”

Fortunately for wine buyers, the scope of Oregon wines in general is quite broad. You will find hundreds of good options in the extensive tasting notes and scores below.

I repeat what I wrote last year at this time to underscore how good is the general quality of the wines we tasted. When you buy an Oregon wine online, in a restaurant or wine shop, the odds are quite high that it’s a small-production wine of excellent quality. Out of the 760 wines we tasted only 39 earned less than 90 points from the JamesSuckling.com team.

– Jim Gordon, Executive Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. Note: You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.