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SCOTT PAUL WINES
Scott Wright left the neon lights of LA
for the green hills of Dundee
so he could make his own pinot his own way
By Cole Danehower
Reprinted with permission
from Oregon Wine Report #20
Subscribe to Oregon Wine Report here
Scott Paul Wright was a perceptive—and lucky—boy. At age 15, he knew that the 1959 La Tâche he was drinking was something special. “Even as a kid,” he recalls, “I knew there was something transcendentally divine about the liquid.”
Calling that experience his “wine epiphany,” Scott has
gone on to make wine—and especially pinot noir—first a
force in his life, and then later the focus of his work life.
“ I started Scott Paul Wines in early 1999,” he says, “prior
to that I had no winemaking experience whatsoever!”
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But what he did have was a lifelong passion for pinot and the wherewithal to indulge his inner burgundy geek.
Growing Up with Wine
Scott grew up around wine. “For some weird reason my Dad got
turned on to wine, and he especially loved burgundy and champagne,” he
remembers.
That was pretty unusual in 1960s-era
Chicago, where a shot and a beer was more normal drinking fare. But
what was even more odd was that
the young Scott was brought along with his father’s enthusiasm.
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“He was the kind of person who, when he liked something, went way over the deep end, instead of just dabbling with it,” says Scott. That enthusiasm led to an extensive cellar and plenty of choices for Scott to sample. “Every night at the dinner table when I was a kid, we had a bottle of champagne, a nice bottle of white burgundy, and a nice bottle of red—and he started teaching me about the wines,” says Scott.
Scott took what he’d learned about
wine with him as he grew into adulthood—including the love of burgundy
- but wine as a career didn’t appear to be in the cards. “At that point, I probably
never gave a thought to wine becoming a career.” With a successful career in a lucrative field, Scott found that “I started having the ability to even further indulge my passion for great burgundy . . . at some point it crossed the line from being an amazing passion to an obsession.” But even as his love of wine grew, Scott’s enjoyment of the music business dimmed (see the sidebar at right). Finally, in the mid 1990s, Scott and his wife decided on a major life change and moved to Yountville, in the heart of Northern California’s prime wine country. Going from music industry maven to wine-making neophyte may have seemed like a big change, but it was one that Scott was emotionally ripe for. Move to the Wine World Relying on some sustaining music industry consulting, Scott started integrating himself into his new life. “I had made friends with a number of winemakers up there, and people who I sort of idolized and really dug their wines,” says Scott. “The two most prominent were Greg La Follette at Flowers and Ted Lemon at Littorai. I just started making a pest of myself, offering to drag hoses and asking questions, until I convinced them of my sincerity.” It was only a short step from offering to work at wineries for free, to wanting to make wine for real. In 1999, through diligent networking and obvious desire, Scott found himself ready with fruit and winery space at Flowers to make his first batch of chardonnay. But the siren song of pinot noir
still played for Scott. After getting to know grower Gary Pisoni,
Scott was able to purchase a packet of
pinot fruit from the famed Santa Lucia Highland grower. But, as
he drove a rented truck down to pick up the fruit, Scott found
that he
had no place to make his wine (Flowers was out of space). Even
as he drove back toward Napa, Scott had no final destination
for his
fruit . . . until the last minute, when a friend located a spare
tank—and
directions phoned to him as he drove his grapes north. “As wonderful as the Pisoni fruit was, and the privilege it was to be able to work with it, it was not truly my style of pinot noir,” he says. “I believe pinot noir at its peak is a wine of texture and elegance and finesse—and Pisoni makes really gorgeous big, deep, fruity wines . . . As a matter of personal choice, if I was going to really express what I wanted to do with pinot noir, I didn’t feel I could do it in California.” On to Oregon and Scott Paul Wines Having now started his Scott Paul Wines company, Scott found Oregon beckoning. Soon the Wrights were back in the housing market, but this time looking in Oregon for a new home, and perhaps a place to make wine. At about the same time, Domaine
Drouhin Oregon (DDO) was in the market for a new general manager—and Scott had all the credentials.
As only the second general manager in DDO’s history, Scott took
to the job with all the élan his marketing background and winemaking
passion could muster. Yet as successful and engaging as that position
was, Scott’s ultimate aim was to develop his own wine under
his own name: Scott Paul Wines. “My winemaking philosophy has boiled down to this: get really good grapes and do absolutely nothing if at all possible. ” Scott calls his winemaking style “old school.” “It’s all about listening to the fruit and letting the fruit go where it wants to go, and trying to let it be the best it can be rather than trying to push it in any one direction.” To that end, Scott tries to live up to the ideal of the noninterventionist
winemaker. The only time intervention is desirable, says Scott, is when it is necessary to prevent the wine from being faulty. “My style of wines are modeled on the wines of the village of Chambolle-Musigny in Burgundy. I like that end of the spectrum of pinot noir: beautiful perfume, hopefully nice silken texture in the mouth, great length, and power without any weight—let’s call it a sort of sneaking concentration and intensity. I look for fruit, and try to make wine, that has the potential to go in that direction.”
Scott’s wines come in two main releases:
the Cuvée Martha
Pirrie, and Le Paulée. Le Paulée, named after the traditional burgundian end-of-harvest party, is intended to “be more of everything,” according toScott. “More concentration, more structure, more complex flavors, longer in the mouth, and it will probably develop in the bottle over a number of years.” Scott is particularly fond of older pinot noirs, and hopes that buyers of his Le Paulée wines will lay some down in their cellar. “I like wines after they’ve had the time to add secondary and tertiary characteristics, and I want to make some wine every year that has a chance to do that,” he says. In 2003 Scott also made a new cuvée he calls Audrey. “I like to say that there are a lot of people these days making what we call Pamela Anderson wines—sort of artificially pumped up. We’re trying to make Audrey Hepburn wines!” What's Still to Come Scott has come a long way since that 1959 La Tâche! And while he may not yet have made its equal under his own name, it still shines as the kind of wine he aspires to making. Scott Paul Wines are made at the
Carlton Winemakers Studio, a unique facility housing a number
of boutique producers—and a far cry
from his first vintage experience. And for right now, making his own pinot noir his own way is a fantastic place for Scott Wright to be. #################### |
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