My guest is Rueben Lange of Amiti in Oregon FromAmiti.com. Rueben first worked a harvest in 2016, but he has packed in something like 12 harvests since then by bouncing between Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and three continents, including some notable vintages at Idiot’s Grace in the Columbia River Gorge, Maison Maenad in the Jura, and Forlorn Hope in California. Rueben says of Amiti:
“The goal of this project - beyond employing the basic tenets of good land stewardship (both in my farming and the vineyards I choose to purchase from), caring for all those who work for me, and crafting wines that are meant to celebrate those I hold dear - is to deeply explore a sustainable future for Oregon, and push the envelope of Hybrid grape varieties. I love vinifera and want to continue to celebrate it, given the remarkable wines that come from them in this state. However, we as an industry continue to push the narrative of this being Pinot country - a notion I believe to be utterly false given the challenges associated with farming it here - and fail to focus on varieties that are better suited to our climate and its ever shifting nature. For that reason, I choose to work with what are considered A-typical, or non-normative varieties for this region, specifically those that I believe are well adapted to the level of climate change I will experience in my lifetime.
I choose to make hybrid wines because I believe that they are the only option for a sustainable future in this state, and present an exciting possibility to develop a true sense of place and varietal typicity, free from the constraints imposed upon us by the old world. If we truly want to develop an understanding of what American terroir looks and tastes like, it seems like a no-brainer to me to do it with a variety that has no mandates handed down from the ‘higher ups’.”
On the last episode we considered how natural wine is not about minimizing intervention but about a total perspective shift to seeing life as process to celebrate. On this episode we again flip a common understanding of natural wine on its head as we discuss how natural wine is not about removing human influence but actually finding the distinctively personal touch of humans engaged in intentionally fermenting. In this spirit, Rueben makes a case for abandoning the zero-zero ethos, or at least any celebration of it or smugness related to it, referring to it as a kind of recipe winemaking for natural wine.
This is a wildly pro-human discussion of wine, that will piss off the misanthropes and the worshipers of that pristine ideal known as “Nature” which is kept pure by lack of contact with the malodorous miscreants known as people. Rather, we envision wine as a flowing stream in which we, besotted beavers that we are, immerse ourselves and play and mate and build dams to overflow the banks and flood our communities with life.
Rueben’s wines have been described as “disorientingly delicious” and I hope you’ll find this conversation to be the same. Enjoy!
