Name a great wine region on basalt. It’s volcanic rock that surfaced as lava, spread out in tongues and cooled into vineyard soils in Mount Etna, the Canary Islands and throughout the Pacific northwest. No mention of Burgundy.
“In France, basalt is the Massif Central,” says Mark Tarlov, joking about what might seem to be a quixotic goal: to understand the terroir of Oregon, a place with soil that doesn’t exist in the great vineyards of France, where the term was invented.
The Willamette Valley has drawn Tarlov, a film producer from New York, and, more recently, a wine producer in these western reaches of the Columbia Basin. It has drawn in Larry Stone, a Master Sommelier from Chicago and San Francisco, and, more recently, a wine producer here as well. Both men are obsessively fascinated by the concept of terroir and have enlisted winemaking partners from Burgundy—Louis Michel Liger-Belair, in the case of Tarlov’s Chapter 24; Dominique Lafon, in the case of Stone’s Lingua Franca.