The Hood River Valley is well-known its wines and vines now, but it wasn’t that way when Anne and Bernard Lerch purchased Hood River Vineyards and Winery in 1992. In those days, there were just three wineries in the entire Columbia River Gorge, and only a handful of vineyards.
Oh, how times have changed. There are now over 30 wineries and more than 45 vineyards up and down the gorge, but the Hood River Vineyards is the oldest, the winery started by Cliff and Eileen Blanchette and son Thomas in 1981.
The Lerch family purchased the business in 1992, coming to Hood River by way of California: Anne grew up in the Bay Area; Bernard in Ohio. The two met at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Anne studied Russian and Soviet Area Studies (she even attended Leningrad State University in the Soviet Union for a semester in the early 1980s, she said) and Bernard received his PhD in Chemistry.
“After a few years in Massachusetts and a few more back in the Bay area, we made a conscious decision to leave the rat race and move to Oregon with our family,” Anne said. “We came to Hood River in 1992, having purchased an orchard in the Oak Grove area. While looking around for property to plant a vineyard, we met the Blanchettes, who were selling the vineyard and winery — good timing for us!”
The Lerches have increased their acreage of vines since acquiring the farm; cultivation is now at around 50 acres. Still, they keep Hood River Vineyards and Winery deliberately small, relying mainly on foot traffic to sell their wines, although they do distribute throughout the state. Production varies from year to year, but it never exceeds more than 5000 cases.
“Our winery has remained small, by choice,” Anne said. “We are lucky to be in an area where we can enjoy good ‘direct to customer’ sales from our tasting room because of our proximity to the highway and the tourist traffic.”
Staying small has helped the Lerches be “hands on,” Anne explained, “and continue to grow the fruit and make the wine ourselves. We do hire help for various tasks, mostly on the farm. And, of course, our five children (Heather, Sean, Caitlin, Dylan, and Kieran) have all done their part, both on the farm and in the winery. This year will be the first harvest that our grandkids (Zach, Noah and Stella) will participate in.”
Coming into the wine business when they did, the Lerches have helped others establish vineyards, too. “For years, we encouraged other fruit growers to try planting grapes on sites where fruit trees might not be a good choice,” she said, noting steep sites with difficult soils are a good choice for grapes.
“Eventually, the Columbia River Gorge AVA was established, and that brought interest from wine industry members from outside the area, who saw that grapes and wines would be more easily marketed with that label. The AVA put the Columbia Gorge on the wine map, so to speak. The rest is history!”
Grape harvest should start in a few weeks, Anne said. It’s a long process. Because the Lerches grow so many different kinds of grapes (more than a dozen in all), harvest stretches out over the course of a month or so, Anne explained. Once the fruit is harvested, the grapes are hand sorted and crushed using a crusher/destemmer.
“The resulting must is then either pressed and put into tanks for fermenting (white wines), or fermented in open vats on the skins (red wines). Later, the wines will be allowed to settle, and then pumped into barrels for aging.”
Wines are aged “a pretty long time, in the case of our ports and sherries especially,” she said. Reds are aged as much as 40 months, while whites take much less time. As for ports and sherries, “we aim for around a decade of aging, depending on each one,” Anne said.
Once the wine has aged, it’s filtered and bottled, with additional aging before the wine is released for sale.
“That’s a very short version of what it takes to go from grape to bottle!” she said. “We make pretty broad variety of wines: reds and whites, and our specialty ports and sherry, all made from fruit we grow both in the orchard and vineyard. We have also always made a small amount of hard cider, a beverage which has now become very popular — what took it so long, in a valley so famous for its pears and apples? All of this keeps us very busy, year-round!”
Anne calls Hood River “a sweet spot for growing fruits of all kinds and varieties.” Besides grapes, the Lerches grow cherries and pears in their orchard, with some apple and plum trees, too.
“Stay tuned for a plum wine,” Anne said.
Bernard is the winemaker, Anne said, whereas hers is a more varied role.
“While my husband is the winemaker, it’s harder to say what my role is, so I’ve given myself the title of Winemaven,” she joked. “We share many tasks, but where Bernard does most of the farming and all the serious winemaking tasks, I tend to run the tasting room, do most of the marketing and PR, and distributor sales, shipping and more.”
Anne said her favorite things to do are “fiddly work” — like pruning — in the vineyard, harvesting the grapes, and talking to visitors from around the world who visit the tasting room.
“We’ve been doing it long enough that I am now also able to share our wines with kids who’ve grown up tagging along with their parents over the years, and that is especially fun,” she added.
Hood River Vineyards and Winery is located at 4693 Westwood Dr. in Hood River, and can be reached via phone at 541-386-3772, or email at hoodrivervineyardsandwinery.com.
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