Loop de Loop Columbia Valley Cabernet Franc Moody Bridges Vineyard 2021
This might be the most delicious Cabernet Franc we’ve tasted all year. Sometimes picking wines for the Club is easy.
Why This Wine?
Wine from the Columbia Valley isn’t supposed to be this vivacious. The Columbia Valley is known for high octane alcohol, sweet, jammy fruit, and creamy oak flavors. Cabernet Franc isn’t supposed to be this much pure fun. Cabernet Franc is supposed to be all about earth and rustic herbs, tannic structure and restraint. Wines that play so completely against type are often our favorite wines. So much of the world of wine is devoted to orthodoxy, to ensuring that wines from certain places fit into standard, recognizable forms. Wines that say something truly new and different stand out that much more. Whatever you think you know about Cabernet Franc from the Columbia Valley, be prepared to be surprised by this one.
About the Winery
Julia Bailey has done more than most of us. She worked in the Portland restaurant scene in the 1990s, during Portland’s first wave of culinary brilliance. She worked for Oregon wineries in the 2000s. She worked in international Aid programs helping refugee communities develop sustainable food. She has worked in wine distribution, and through it all, there was a constant, gentle tug on the edge of her thoughts, drawing her towards making wine ever since she watched her grandmother make jam and homemade wine from the backyard vines on the family farm in Iowa. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, she and her partner Scott bought a vineyard and built a winery in the Underwood District of the Columbia Gorge (with a stunning view of Mt Hood). Loop de Loop wines are organically farmed, whether or not Julia and Scott are doing the farming, and wines are always spontaneously fermented, unfined, and unfiltered.
Wine in the Desert
The Columbia Valley doesn’t look much like wine country at first glance. It took a few very specific personalities, a lot of imaginative dreamers, and successive waves of immigrants from Italy, France, and Germany to settle this arid network of river valleys with vineyards. The first grapes in the Valley were planted by the Frenchman Charles Sanno in 1859. By the 1920s, irrigation projects in the Yakima Valley opened up more arable land, and a fellow named William Bridgman both wrote the laws governing the irrigation canal and planted vines himself. The first vines in the Columbia Gorge were Concord grapes in 1880, but Zinfandel soon followed, and a few scattered vineyards survived prohibition and decades of neglect. It wasn’t until 1970 that the vineyards of the Columbia River began to produce a significant amount of fine wine, but the region has grown up quickly. It is a testament to imagination that vines grow here at all.
Wine Details
Appellation
The Columbia Valley is dry, hot and sunny. Defined by the deposits of the Missoula floods, the region offers a mix of basalt, gravel, and sandy alluvial deposits for vine growers to choose from. With an area covering most of western Washington and a significant slice of Oregon’s northern border, there’s a tremendous amount of diversity among the Valley’s several hundred vineyards. The challenge all growers face is to mitigate heat and slow down the ripening process.
The Vineyard
Moody Bridges Vineyard is at the confluence of the Deschuttes and Columbia River, just outside The Dalles. It’s a remarkable site on a hillside, over basalt and sandy soil and all by itself, with the Columbia River on one side and hundreds of square miles of wheat fields on the other. It doesn’t look much like wine country, but we will vouch for the results.
The Wine
Nose of deep boysenberry and bitter chocolate, violet and lavender and cinnamon. The palate is utter silk, with blueberries, blackberries, and orange oil all through with a touch of turned earth.