Recent Press on Trisaetum

Harvey Steiman At Large - Wine Spectator
Counting on the Details
Posted: 11:52 AM ET, April 07, 2008

While out selling his own wines, Josh Bergström has found himself in some of America's best restaurants, either getting the wines on their lists or wining and dining customers. That's how he got behind the scenes at Le Bernardin in New York, and used some of what he saw there in designing the new Trisaetum winery in Oregon, including a room full of white boards.

Wineries use white boards all the time, to keep track of fermentations, write reminders notes about what needs to be done, that sort of thing. Restaurants use them to list what dishes are gone, so the waiters don't keep selling them. But at Le Bernardin, Bergström saw a room with every wall covered in white board, where chef Eric Ripert and his kitchen staff brainstorm recipe ideas.

"That clicked for me," says Bergström. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought wineries ought to start acting more like restaurants." Restaurant kitchens use innovative designs to give chefs what they need to make the food they want. Wineries do that, too, but Trisaetum's new winery not only has state-of-the-art equipment, it has a room full of white boards.

"It's all about the thought process," says owner James Frey. "They think about recipes, we think about what we can do to make the best wines."

Maybe it was the lunch Bergström, Frey and I were sharing in San Francisco that got us talking about restaurants as we tasted Trisaetum's first efforts. The 2005 and 2006 Pinot Noirs are placeholders. They used grapes from the Bergström family's vineyards. The '05 is a delicate, crisp style that's slow to develop, but tasted quite elegant over lunch. The '06, which seemed simple and fruity when I tasted it at the winery last fall, has become richer and more compelling.

The Freys' vineyards produced their first crop, and the winery got its first use, in 2007. It was a challenge. Rain interrupted the vintage repeatedly. Fanatical sorting was necessary to get the wines right. Plenty of other wineries did it, and many vintners actually seem optimistic now that the wines are through their first winter, none more so than Bergström and Frey, who had the advantage of "the most expensive sorting table in Oregon," according to Frey.

Thank you, white boards.

It'll still be a few years before we know if all these details will result in something special. After all, the vineyards are new. They are in good spots, but what kind of wine will they actually make, and will they develop in the bottle?

Frey, incidentally, is not the writer of the same name who got caught making up his memoirs, but a young corporate type who decided to buy land in Oregon, plant vineyards and build a winery with his wife, Andrea, and parents, Jim and Valerie Frey. They hired Bergström as winemaker. Although he has had to give up his several other winemaking deals (he had been making the wines for Ayoub, for example), this is the one outside position he has retained.

He got the Freys to invest in a winery built to his specifications. It uses innovative technology to sort, cool, dry and handle the fruit so that, as Bergström puts it, "nothing goes into the tank that we don't want: no leaves, no bugs, not even the little spurs that are left after de-stemming."

That's one of the ideas that came from the white-board sessions. So did the innovative approach of planting two vineyards in two different AVAs with the idea of blending them together into one wine, and having no second label to compete against this single blend, rather than nearly every other winery's holy grail of single-vineyard wines.

"Rather than making a lot of separate wines, I'd rather put all the effort into keeping track of weather forecasts, the progress in every corner of the vineyards, and sampling every barrel and every tank so we know how the wine is developing," Bergström adds. All on the white boards, of course.

Harvey Steiman At Large - Wine Spectator
New Developments from Soter, Bergström
Posted: 11:23 AM ET, September 28, 2007

Two prominent Oregon winemakers are involved with big new projects that will be debuting this fall. I got the first taste of these important new wines from Tony Soter and Josh Bergström this week, the first time either wine was shown to a journalist.

Bergström's new venture is with a new project called Trisaetum, owned by the Frey family. They planted a 24-acre vineyard in 2004 on rocky soil on the coast range of the Yamhill-Carlton District, near McMinnville, and currently are planting a 30-acre vineyard on WillaKenzie soil on Ribbon Ridge. That property abuts Beaux Frères.

They also built a state-of-the-art winery to Bergström's specifications, using innovative technology to sort, cool, dry and handle the fruit so that, as Bergström puts it, "nothing goes into the tank that we don't want, no leaves, no bugs, not even the little spurs that are left after de-stemming." The first wines will be made in this winery this year.

The first wine, 100 cases of a 2005, will be released later this fall at about $75. The grapes came from Bergström's vineyards in Dundee Hills and Chehalem Mountains, selected to emulate the same soil conditions as the Freys' vineyards. The 2006, made from the first crop off of the coast range vineyard, comes next year. Both wines, which were made at Bergström, show rich flavors and delicate textures. The 2006, from the new vineyard, shows distinctive cherry and white pepper flavors. Both have impressive length.

Plans are to make one single wine that blends the two vineyards into a distinctive, high-end wine. There will be no regional blends or single vineyard designations to confuse matters. I can't think of another winery based on this kind of a model. The closest is Domaine Drouhin Oregon, which makes everything from a single estate vineyard in Dundee Hills. But their best wines are small lots of separate selections.

Ultimately, Trisaetum could make as much as 5,000 cases a year of a single red wine, a blend of two vineyards in two different AVAs. It will drive the terroir-istes nuts, but it will be fascinating to see how this whole thing evolves, especially with a talented winemaker like Bergström guiding the style and quality.