Blame it on the Mosel. Many working in the wine trade will point to one, two, maybe three wines as their lightbulb moment, but for Barnaby Tuttle, it was a tasting of 14 crystalline, mineral-driven German Rieslings. To say he was inspired would be an understatement: Tuttle listed every single wine for the restaurant where he worked.

Yet Tuttle’s epiphany would have further-reaching ramifications than his new wine list. He spent the next few years meeting as many winemakers as possible, peppering them with questions to shore up his scientific knowledge. He planted a test vineyard at his house and made wine as a hobby. He made pilgrimages to the Mosel to learn from those growers who had inspired him.
In 2005, the opportunity arose for Barnaby and his wife, Olga, to plant a vineyard on their friend’s farm just outside the AVA boundary of the Willamette Valley on the eastern flank of the Coast Range. They jumped in with both feet and, come 2008, Barnaby and Olga had quit their day jobs to set up Teutonic wines. Today, they work with several cool, old-vine, dry-farmed, high-elevation sites throughout the Willamette Valley and beyond, making fresh, linear, lithe single-vineyard wines that speak clearly of site, soil and season.

Unlike many in Oregon, and the Willamette Valley in particular, Barnaby and Olga are not constrained by boundaries. They work with many great sites that fall outside the nested AVAs and—in the case of Alsea—even the Willamette Valley boundary itself. “There are so many great vineyards and terroirs labelled as Willamette Valley or even just Oregon,” he says. But if the climate is right, every soil has a story to tell, and I see it as my responsibility to tell the story of that soil, of that site. It’s the vineyard that’s the story at the end of the day.”
Everything at Teutonic begins and ends with the site: first in finding, then farming and finally in gently guiding and developing the singular character of each vineyard and variety into the bottle. Working with passionate and dedicated growers, all of Teutonic’s sources are cool-climate, dry-grown sites farmed either sustainably or organically by dedicated growers. They search for balanced crops with maximum hang time―Barnaby picks incredibly late (Riesling in October!) compared to some of his colleagues―to allow for slower ripening thereby building more complexity at lower sugar levels and higher acidities.

Vineyard yeasts kick-start each fermentation—Tuttle uses a pied de cuve to further instill site-specific biology in the wines. The soils vary, but many vineyards lie on Bellpine soils—a variant of the Willamette Valley’s famous Jory soils—which are rich in iron and have excellent drainage. In the cellar, it’s all about shepherding the quality of the fruit into the bottle. Save for a little sulphur, nothing is added. And it should go without saying that no new wood is allowed to distort the purity of these wild-fermented wines, which are bottled unfined and unfiltered.

The range of white wines includes Riesling, Pinot Gris, Grüner Veltliner and Pinot Blanc, with mainly Pinot Noir and Meunier for the reds, which are bottled in Alsatian flutes in keeping with Teutonic’s Germanic inspiration. These restrained, stimulating and unadorned wines are a breath of fresh air for the Oregon wine scene and have won the Tuttle family a legion devoted fans in both critical and consumer circles. Teutonic wines can be found on the lists of the finest restaurants in the USA and we hope, in good time, the same can be said of Australia.