Dijon and Horseshoes

Before my arrival in 1990, the Dijon block was a grassy pasture for the string of pack ponies that had made the old barn their home. They left their calling cards scattered around the open ground. Horseshoes by the dozen emerged from the soil with our early plowing. Looking back, I think of each one as a talisman foretelling of great, good fortune as measured in wines to come from that unplanted ground.

Brick House Vineyards, Dijon block, 1992

We thought it looked like a sweet spot from the start; a gently sloping spine running north-south and falling away to the east on one side, the west on another. Elevation : 450 feet. So in the early spring 1995 we planted it to three principal clones of Pinot Noir, identified by numbers: 113, 114 and 115. “That’s your Grand Cru site” a neighboring winegrower said back then.

He was right. And it didn’t take long for all those horseshoes to work their magic. The 1998 “Les Dijonnais” Pinot Noir from the site’s young vines was one of the top-rated wines in Oregon. Subsequent vintages seem to have been favorites with the wine press and, most tellingly, with the Brick House winery team right up to the current day.

No longer young, the Dijon block is now in its prime, delivering the complexity and elegance one expects from carefully tended twenty-nine-year-old vines.

—Doug Tunnell