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WINEMAKING TECHNICAL REVIEW Getting It Right After 40 Years Pinot pioneer pours decades of winemaking knowledge into Willamette Valley site By Tim Patterson NORTHWEST Ponzi Vineyards WA Portland Ponzi Vineyards' new home is in Sherwood, Ore., southwest of Portland. met a tank they didn't want to customize. Dick Ponzi has plenty of artistic D cred, having been one of the pioneers of Pinot in Oregon's Willamette Val- ley back when most folks thought both the grape and the place were bad bets. But after three decades of making top-notch wines in a cramped, make-it- up-as-you-go facility, his inner engineer re-emerged, leading Ponzi to person- ally design every detail of a new, larger, environmentally friendly gravity-flow winery—and to oversee all construction as his own general contractor. It's a reminder that before he became a wine guy, Dick Ponzi helped design rides for Disneyland, among other engineering jobs. Set in the middle of 42 WINES & VINES NOVEMBER 2012 eep down inside, some wine- makers are artists—the kinds of people who never met a grape they didn't (at least briefly) fall in love with. Oth- ers are engineers who never Pacific Ocean Eugene Bend OREGON CA NV a vineyard, the structure he built in 2007-08 is all concrete and steel and glass, highly functional, no muss, no fuss. Though the facility has a fantasy name—Colligno del Sogno, "Hillside of our Dreams"—there are no fanciful flying buttresses, no Piemontese campa- nile. The idea, he says, was to retain all the techniques and practices (and most of the equipment) that had proven suc- cessful at the old winery but make the whole process much less labor intensive. He says his daughter Luisa, now Ponzi's winemaker, commented after her first harvest in the new digs, "I never realized how easy it was to make wine." You can almost hear Dick Ponzi saying, "Easy for her, maybe." ID Highlights • After more than three decades of making Pinot Noir in Oregon, Dick Ponzi designed and built the winery he always wanted. • The design maintained winemaking practices from the old winery, but with much less manual labor. • The facility has four levels, connected by a gravity-flow system, with maximum flexibility for how space is used. Clean and lean The winery building is basically a shell on top of four flat, cavernous levels dug into and descending down a hillside slope. Nearly every winemaking operation works through some kind of gravity flow, and Ponzi says here it's actual gravity at work (not temporary gravity created by an endless series of forklift maneuvers, which was the style at the old winery.) At and well under the ground level, the winery is all concrete, topped by windows that al- low in plenty of indirect light and covered with a reflective zinc-aluminum roof. ADAM BACHER PHOTOGRAPHY