Huevos con Vino - Winery Profile of JK Carriere
Until my recent trip to the Portland, Oregon area for Thanksgiving, I had not heard about JK Carriere. But that’s hardly surprising: The winery has been in business since 1999, and their wines are distributed in 12 states right now. So don’t feel bad if this post is the first time you’ve heard of this exciting winery.
The winery itself is a little hard to spot from the road. We blew past the sign because it was pointing the other direction on the 4-lane highway off of which the winery sits. We turned around and made the 250-yard dash to the old white barn that now serves as the tasting room and that houses part of the winery machinery.
Walking into JK Carriere the day after Thanksgiving
I like the winery building itself. The idea of repurposing an old barn-type structure is terrific as it highlights the connection to the local territory, the agricultural “roots” of winemaking, etc. It sure feels much less sterile than some of the postmodern, minimalist winery designs I’ve seen in California (which I do like on the whole).
Inside the winery, the tasting on the day after Thanksgiving was split across a few different tables with an Italian cheese table in between. The wines of JK Carriere lend themselves well to this sort of tasting approach. Here’s a list of the current releases; only the Pinot Noirs were available for tasting at the time, and all of these wines are 2004 vintage:
- Willamette Valley Pinot Noir ($42/bottle) - Their mid-range Pinot, so to speak, but at 667 cases this “mid-range” wine is the same price as the “entry-level” Domaine Drouhin Willamette Valley release. The JK Carriere Provocateur is the comparable “entry-level” wine (at $24/bottle).
- Antoinette ($65/bottle) - Wine made from Temperance Hill grapes, which have a longer pedigree than many Oregon vineyards at 25+ years; I remember liking this wine but not enough to drop $65 on it. As with all of the vineyard-designated wines, they made 75 cases in 2004.
- Shea Vineyard ($65/bottle) - Pure Dijon 777 wine; Shea is such a hot vineyard right now, particularly after the recent ratings in Pinot Report and Wine Spectator. Very nice and ripe, but again I wonder whether $65 is too much to spend.
- Anderson Family ($65/bottle) - Pure Dijon 115 wine; interesting taste, much more red fruit than the Shea or Antoinette releases. Very nice, and probably my favorite of the four wines I tasted right after Thanksgiving.
One note here, too: All of these wines, despite coming from different vineyards and despite being picked at different times (I assume), feature 13.75% alcohol content. That’s really interesting to me as I can only assume they chose to stop fermentation at a specific point in each case regardless of the type of wine being produced. Now, I don’t have any issues with that, but I would love to talk to the winemaker about this choice and how they came to make it.
JK Carriere does make a couple of other wines that were sold out already in November. The following photo shows one of the interior views of the winery, along with a sample of these other wines.
Selection of JK Carriere wines
As a brand, JK Carriere really has its act together. The wine labels are well done, the overall branding message and marketing story are clear and strong throughout the line of offerings, and the Web site is simple but very functional and content complete. At the tasting, it made sense to offer the Italian cheeses through a third party, local cheesemaker. They were delicious and they complemented the wines well, although the people serving cheese didn’t know much about the wines so combining the cheese and wine was a bit of a crapshoot.
They were even handing out M&M’s themed with JK Carriere logo and whatnot. Very classy.
Sometimes, though, all the branding and classy logos and marketing speak on the Web site can drag down the overall premise of the winery. Yes, they do distinguish themselves from the hundreds of other Pinot-focused Oregon wineries by producing such a strong marketing message. But they also make me wonder how much of the $65/bottle cost goes into the marketing budget rather than the winemaking side of the house. I guess I’d be a hypocrite to criticize JK Carriere too much here; I like how thoughtful and complete the entire visitation experience was (particularly compared to other wineries out there).
I guess I felt like the visit was not unique to me. I like going to a winery and feeling like I had a slightly different experience than everyone else, and maybe that sort of feeling only comes from visiting the really tiny, “mom ‘n’ pop” operations out there. I know there are plenty such places in Eastern Washington and even in the Willamette Valley AVA, but the numbers seem to be dwindling as the stakes are raised to turn a profit. With so many wineries competing for casual wine drinkers, the next 10 years should prove difficult for many wineries that don’t quite know who they are or where they fit into the marketplace. JK Carriere appears to be very much aware of this situation, and their marketing story seems perfectly structured as a result. But at $65/bottle for the really interesting wines (and 50-75 cases per year over the last couple of years), I don’t know if I can see buying too many bottles for myself.
So, in summary, I really do like the JK Carriere winery. I really think they’ve got a good thing going, and I hope they are successful. But I guess they have refined the experience of visiting and tasting their wine so carefully that it all felt a little too much like a larger-scale operation, and that was a tiny bit disappointing to me. Still, their wines are delicious and I’d love to try their “Glass” Pinot Noir, a rosé that retails for $20/bottle when it’s available. Now that sounds cool!