Daedalus Cellars is a small, family-owned and operated winery located in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. We source some of the state’s best vineyards and handle the fruit minimally and carefully to create elegant, complex wines with structure and acidity for long-term aging. Our obsession is Pinot Noir, though we also produce small amounts of Pinot Gris, Syrah, Riesling, Chardonnay and Grüner Veltliner.
Daedalus was a Greek inventor, most notably of the Labyrinth at Knossos. James Joyce later celebrated the inventor’s achievements, as well as his creative struggles, in two of our favorite books, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. We chose the name to represent the inventive spirit that both Daedalus and Joyce brought to their work, along with their creative struggles.
Before we produced our first wine, we had begun developing relationships with our favorite vineyard owners. With clear stylistic aims, we have sought vineyards that could supply the necessary raw ingredients: old vines, high natural acidity and maximum growing season. We now have long-term contracts with our favorite sites in the state, including Maresh, Seven Springs and Carabella Vineyards. We also own 17 acres of beautiful slope in the Dundee Hills which we will start to plant to Pinot Noir in June 2008.
To fully mature the most concentrated, flavorful fruit possible, we limit our crops, both red and white, to less than two tons-per-acre, often nearer to one ton. Our wines undergo slow, gentle fermentations, without the use of yeast, enzymes, nutrients or any other homogenizers. In fact, a necessary criterion for inclusion under the Daedalus label is that no additions be made to the must or wine other than the ubiquitous preservative sulfur dioxide. We move our wines only by gravity and age them in a minimum of new oak to maintain focus on the fruit’s inherent characteristics.
We blend vineyards rather than producing vineyard-designate wines. It is demanding to maintain the character of a single-vineyard through bottling, but we believe it is still more challenging, and the result more rewarding and complex, to maintain the identifiable character of all the vineyards included in a blend. We rate each barrel in the cellar repeatedly throughout the year. The best individual barrels from the oldest vineyards that co-exist most harmoniously become the “Labyrinth”. Any wines that do not meet our stylistic or qualitative expectations become the foundation of our second label. What remains is our “Willamette Valley”.
We created a second label, Jezebel, in 2002. The name celebrates our favorite of the Biblical whores. The style emulates the wine’s namesake: voluptuous, fruity and overly familiar.
