Wine Making
Great Wine Begins in the Vineyard
As any wine expert will tell you location is the most important factor when it comes to wine, where the grapes are grown is what makes a wine unique. Our estate vineyard is perfectly situated at 450-500 ft. elevation in the heart of the Ribbon Ridge Appellation in the Northern Willamette Valley in Yamhill County, Oregon and consists of a total of 16.8 acres of sloping contiguous south facing hillsides of Willakenzie soils. Careful attention to every detail from the vine into the bottle is also essential. We are fortunate to have an outstanding team that works with us to produce the finest wines possible. Our vineyard is farmed meticulously throughout the year by Stirling Grape Management. We are very pleased to have veteran Oregon Wine Maker Aron Hess as our consulting winemaker. Aron is also actively involved in monitoring the development and maturity of the fruit throughout the growing season. Once harvested, our fruit is processed at one of the leading winery facilities in the country. 12th and Maple winery, located in Dundee, Oregon, is home to the finest industry equipment available. Utopia greatly benefits from the use of this operation in making our quality wines.
Hand-Sorting and EuroSelect De-stemmers
Once our fruit arrives at the winery, attention immediately turns to its temperature. This ensures that sorting and de-stemming occurs at the optimum temperature to prevent any detrimental early-stage fermentation. Our winery facility has cooling rooms that allow the fruit to cool before processing, ensuring the best quality.
Once processing begins, our fruit is carefully hand-sorted before being placed into the state-of-the-art EuroSelect Destemmer that gently removes the grapes from stems using rubber fingers rather than the crushing jaws that some destemmers employ. This also results in many more whole berrries. After de-stemming, whole berries are carefully sorted again to ensure only the best quality fruit is included in the fermentation process.
Utopia carefully ferments our Pinot Noir by using small-lot fermentation tanks. These smaller tanks allow us to carefully craft wines that are often inoculated using a variety of yeasts to bring out different flavor profiles that are later blended. Fermentation temperatures are carefully controlled and managed through the use of probes that measure the exact temperature at the core of the must, rather than just the outside of the fermentation tank.
Aging
Our Pinot Noir is aged in a combination of new and once used French oak barrels produced by one of the world’s finest Burgundian coopers, Francois Freres. Utopia typically uses a mixture of tightly grained Allier and Troncais forests and medium plus toast barrels to impart a balanced oak influence into our Pinot Noir without over-oaking the wines. We generally age our wines 11 – 12 months. Throughout aging, our barrels are held in temperature and humidity controlled barrel rooms to ensure that we deliver on our commitment to produce the finest quality wine possible. Our wines are bottled at 12th and Maple Winery and stored in their temperature controlled warehouse.
Our Commitment to You
As you can see by our attention to every detail, Utopia is highly committed to producing only the finest wines possible. Our outstanding viticulture, winemaking, and storage team, working collaboratively from our vineyards and into the state-of the art winery and storage facilities, are key ingredients that help us produce our outstanding wines.