Sustainability & Winemaking
Twenty-two acres in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. Dry-farmed since 1984. Every wine made a few hundred feet from where the fruit grew.
How We Farm
The vineyard sits on ancient marine sedimentary soils — Peavine and Willakenzie — at an average of 725 feet. It has been dry-farmed since the first vines were planted in 1984. No irrigation. The vines root deep for their own water, and the fruit that comes back is smaller, more concentrated, and better balanced for the wines we want to make.
We keep cover crops between the rows, build the soil with compost and organic fertilizers, and rely on natural pest and disease control wherever we can. A healthy vineyard is a biodiverse one, so we leave room for beneficial insects and wildlife to live here too. The winery has run on solar since 2008.
How We Make the Wine
Fruit is handpicked and sorted here. Blocks are kept separate through fermentation, so we can taste what each one did in a given year before deciding where it belongs — a single-block bottling, a blend, or the base for sparkling.
Sparkling is the through-line. Trudy made the first Celebrate Müller-Thurgau in 2001, when sparkling Müller-Thurgau in Oregon was essentially unheard of. Traditional method followed in 2009 — bottle-fermented, aged en tirage in our cellar, riddled and disgorged on site. Time on the lees is the one part of the process that can’t be shortened, and we don’t try. Roughly 40% of what we make is sparkling.
Kramer is a founding member of Method Oregon, the nonprofit that established the state’s first quality standard for traditional method sparkling wine.
Our Wines
Nine varieties grow on this estate. They sort into four families.
Sparkling
Two programs. Celebrate is modern method — single-variety, fruit-forward, made since 2001. The traditional method cuvées — Brut, Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs, Brut Rosé — are bottle-fermented and aged on the lees in our cellar.
Pinot Noir
Planted at the founding and added to since. Bottled by block and by blend — from the Willamette Valley bottling through Cardiac Hill, Rebecca’s Reserve, and Heritage, which comes off some of the oldest own-rooted vines on the property.
Chardonnay
One of the three varieties in the original 1984 planting. It goes two directions here: still Chardonnay, and the backbone of the traditional method sparkling program.
Aromatic & Estate Whites
Müller-Thurgau, Grüner Veltliner, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Noir Blanc. Müller-Thurgau has been the surprise of this vineyard for forty years — our original Riesling was eventually grafted over to it, not the other way around.
We also grow Pinot Meunier for the sparkling blends, and Carmine — a rare California cross, planted here in 1989 from cuttings given to us by a neighbor.
Come See It
The clearest way to understand how we farm and how we make wine is to walk the rows and taste through the lineup with us.