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"Papa Pinot"
David Lett arrived in the Willamette Valley in 1965 at the age of 25 with 3,000 vine cuttings from Davis in the bed of his uncle's horse trailer. He originally planted them south of Salem in Corvallis, while he searched for vineyard land closer to Portland in the Northern half of the Valley. In 1966 Lett purchased 20 acres at $450 each in the Dundee Hills. Four years later, he bottled his first Pinot Noir under the Eyrie label and sold it for $2.65 a bottle. The same year he harvested the New World's first Pinot Gris, a variety that would eventually become the Willamette Valley's signature white wine grape.
For the first couple years Lett could barely convince an alcoholic to drink his wines, but things changed fast. In 1979, Lett's '75 Eyrie South Block Reserve Pinot Noir would take second place behind famed Burgundy producer Joseph Drouhin's 1959 Chambolle-Musigny in a blind tasting of American Pinot Noir versus French Burgundy. Oregon was officially on the international radar and pioneers looking for a piece of the action were pounding stakes into every naked piece of Willamette loam.