Dena Drews & Ernie Pink - Amalie Robert Estate
“One Enchanted Evening”

One evening in the fall of 1997, two corporate consultants attended a highly esteemed wine dinner in Oregon. They left enchanted. A year later they began searching for some Willamette Valley soil to cultivate as home.

In the spring of 1999 they happened upon an old cherry orchard. They befriended the gentleman who was farming Montmorency cherries and learned about the orchard. "I told him it looked like his orchard was planted on top of my vineyard. We both smiled and the deal was done," Drews said.

After a crash course in agriculture from the Montmorency grower, they harvested cherries that summer and began preparations for vineyard planting the following spring.

Their first ten acres of vines were planted and complete on Earth Day in the spring of 2000. Now 29 acres of vines (comprised of Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Syrah and Viognier) stretch over south facing slopes about 15 miles southwest of Salem in the central Willamette Valley.

Though Drews and Pink emerged from the hi-tech field, their farming, pruning and harvesting is all done by hand. For example, the trellis system is a Vertical Shoot Position (VSP) design. Translation- throughout the weeks of late May through June, they try to direct the growth of every cane to be "upright" within the trellis system.

"To lend some perspective, imagine that a typical vine has 16 shoots, this means we will have about 672,000 shoots that will need to be positioned - by hand," Drews said.

But they can't imagine doing anything else. What started out as sketches and notes on cocktail napkins- from deciding on clones and rootstocks to planting vines and pounding posts, they have done it all. Add to that, designing and building a gravity flow estate winery and it feels like home.