Dewey and Robin Kelly - Ribbon Ridge
“Passion with a dash of Wild West ”

The first harvest that charmed Dewey Kelly was in 1974 when he clipped, picked and sorted grape clusters alongside Oregon Pinot noir visionary David Lett (also known as Papa Pinot). "To me, what those guys did was magic," Kelly said. As much as he admired the early wine pioneers, he never thought he would be a winemaker.

Until one afternoon around 1970, his moment of magic transpired while indulging two Pacific Northwest delights in the midst of a sea of vines. At the time, Kelly was managing a restaurant and took a staff excursion to a friend's vineyard with the mission: decide which Oregon variety paired best with salmon.

"I poached a whole salmon, he provided the wine," he said. And while sitting on the lawn overlooking the vineyard, he envisioned that he could grow grapes and his friend could make the wine. "We started looking for vineyard land the next day."

In 2003, 29 years later and 25 years after purchasing vineyard property, Kelly crafted his first commercial vintage on his own. He recalled that first day of harvest in 2003 with vivid clarity: "A hollow pit in my stomach started in the vineyard as we began harvesting the fruit and grew throughout the morning and peaked as the fruit arrived to the crush pad."

It's a feeling he likened to standing on the edge of the Kawarau Bridge in Queenstown, New Zealand before bungee jumping free. It was a blind leap of faith. Everything was about to change. "I must say that first crush was as exhilarating as stepping off the bridge," he said.

Three years after his leap into winemaking, Kelly has increased production from 350 cases to 1100 in 2006. His goal is to reach 2000 cases, but not much beyond that. He's Indie through and through. One of a handful of artisan producers who lease space at the Carlton Winemaker's Studio, Kelly finds that Indie and Oregon (passion with a dash of Wild West) go hand in hand.

"I don't know that the environment exists anywhere else in the country to support such a large number of small, passionate, high-quality producers. The Indie spirit may not be possible anywhere but Oregon."