PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Dan Diephouse and Jeanne Feldkamp love champagne so much, they’ve been to France to learn about the process from growth to production.
Since 2017, they’ve been pouring those traditional methods into producing sparkling wines in the Willamette Valley.
“It starts with a love for champagne. We both love champagne quite a bit,” said Diephouse, who co-owns Corollary Wines with Feldkamp.
What they’ve learned “is the same method they use to produce champagne. If it’s called champagne, it means it’s produced in the Champagne region. But the process we use to make the wine is the same.”
Sparkling wine is often known for bottle-popping at big events. But Diephouse and Feldkamp enjoy showing people how it can be an everyday drink, too.
“It just seemed like there was a tremendous opportunity here to focus on sparkling,” he said. “We have the right varieties: we have pinot noir, pinot meunier, chardonnay. We have great farmers, great climate and it just seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
“It’s kind of a light bulb moment for a lot of people, which is my favorite part of doing tastings,” she added. “It’s also really cool to introduce people to the idea that sparkling is a really great food wine.”
Whether it’s their wine or one from another area, the couple will sing the praises of other producers. They said this region embraces collaborations over cut-throat competitiveness. In fact, relationships are so important to them they named their business Corollary Wines.
“The soil, the farming, the microclimates we’re looking at,” Feldkamp said. “Corollation is also a math word that is basically a thing you know to be true based on another thing you know to be true. So our idea is: if you choose great places, with the right soils, farm thoughtfully and you stay out of the winery, the corollary of all of that is beautiful wine.”
Corollary is getting ready to grow. They recently bought a large property where they planted a vineyard and will eventually do sparkling-focused wine research.
Through this summer they’re doing tastings at Ruddick/Wood in Newberg on Fridays and Saturdays.
Diephouse said he thinks “we all want to help define this region as a world-class region for sparkling wine.”
“We just really believe in this region as one of the best places in the world to be making sparkling and we’d love for everybody to know that,” Feldkamp said.