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QuickTake:
For wineries in the southern Willamette Valley, harvest started in early September and is almost over. The winemakers at King Estate Winery say 2025 should be a fantastic year.
Grape harvesters start early, while temperatures are cool. On Monday morning, Oct. 6, they were plucking the final clusters of pinot noir grapes from the oldest vines at King Estate Winery on Territorial Highway about 20 miles southwest of Eugene.
After weeks of round-the-clock operations to harvest, the winery is nearly done with its harvest by the first week of October, a welcome early finish that signals 2025 should be an exceptional vintage for Oregon wine.
“To be a winemaker, you have to be a very good planner, but you also have to be willing to change the plan, sometimes daily,” said Brent Stone, King Estate’s co-CEO and winemaker, describing harvest season. “That can drive some people crazy.”
Assistant winemaker Matt Danner described the controlled chaos as “a little like jazz,” as he sat in what the team calls the war room, or harvest HQ, monitoring real-time data on the vineyards and winery.
The 2025 harvest yielded King Estate approximately 2,700 tons of grapes. The weather cooperated to yield ideal ripeness and concentrated flavors that some wine experts call a “winemaker’s vintage,” meaning they result in highly acclaimed wine.
“This harvest has been fantastic,” Stone said. “We had ripe fruit, and a lot of it early on. Generally, that’s a good thing in Oregon, if you can get it in before the rainy season starts. It’s been so warm that it’s resulted in a lot of dehydration in a lot of the fruit. So it’s going to be lower yields, less weight, but more concentrated flavors, which is good. We can’t get too far ahead of ourselves, because we’ve still got to make the wine, but this will go down as a very good year.”
As fermentation tanks bubble away and the smell of fermenting grapes fills the production facility, the winery plans to continue running 24/7 operations through Oct. 16 as they wrap up harvest for this year. After that, the juice will spend anywhere from eight to 18 months in French oak barrels before it’s bottled on King Estate’s custom Italian bottling line, which can process and label up to 3,000 cases per day.
King Estate bottles about 250,000 cases annually, or about 3 million bottles. That production level consistently puts them in the top 5 Oregon wineries for production each year.
An organic approach
King Estate was founded in 1991 by Ed King and his father, who was also named Ed King. Today, the 1,200-acre estate is North America’s largest biodynamic-certified vineyard. Biodynamic certification means the land is managed for soil fertility, crop protection and animal welfare with organic principles of not using synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Beyond that, biodynamic emphasizes reducing dependence on imported materials, so King Estate creates all of its own compost, for instance.
The winery employs a falconer during harvest season to scare off the birds who want to eat the grapes, which is one of the estate’s most persistent challenges.
“The birds know when the grapes are ripe, so they kind of shadow our picking schedule,” said Stone, while gesturing to birds waiting on nearby wires. “[The falconer] will go out ahead of us when we pick and run the falcons and it keeps the birds away.”
The estate’s organic gardens provide food for the crew and for its on-site restaurant. During the harvest window of Sept. 8 through Oct. 31, the restaurant offers a limited menu of cheese, charcuterie and cheesecake as the chef focuses on feeding the harvest crew. The tasting room is open by reservation only.
Hand and machine working together
At King Estate, the harvest combines old and new techniques. About 50% of the vineyard’s fruit is hand-picked, with crews working at sunrise to bring in the fruit. The remaining fruit comes in via mechanical harvesters.
Inside the production facility, hand-picked clusters move down sorting lines, where workers carefully remove any leaves or other debris, and pick out clusters showing signs of sun damage and botrytis, a fungus that reduces grape quality.
“This is definitely a high-quality way to process — hand-sorted,” Stone said. “We run really, really slow.”
Once workers have sorted and destemmed the fruit, it moves to one of hundreds of small fermentation tanks. This year, King Estate is managing approximately 300 individual fermentations, keeping every parcel of land (known as blocks), clone and variety separate. Everything goes into individual barrels. When it’s time to make the wine, the team uses those hundreds of different flavors as a “spice rack,” Stone said, to create the blends of wine that have the qualities they want.
In the winery’s lab, manager Kelsey Knutzon and her team monitor up to 400 fermentations daily, checking everything from sugar levels to acidity and nitrogen content.
“We use all the chemistry and all the math as tools, paint brushes,” Knutzon said. “A lot of the art is in these tiny decisions on things like when to drain red wine off the skins when you think it’s ready. Wine has been made without all this information for a long time, but it’s nice to have these tools, and it allows us to make it as consistent from year to year as we can, but always a little different.”
In the war room, a large map shows the entire vineyard broken into blocks and a live database tracks fruit chemistry. Stone and his team use this information to make strategic decisions about picking and routing fruit from tank to barrel.
“There’s a 24/7 presence in this room during harvest, because you have such a narrow window to get your raw material,” Stone said. “Oftentimes there’s just a two- to three-day window to get it.”
The 2025 harvest comes on the heels of significant recognition for King Estate’s wines.
In 2024 the winery’s 2023 King Estate Pinot Gris clocked in at No. 6 on the Top 100 Best Buys list created by Wine Enthusiast magazine. In 2023, the 2022 Inscription Pinot Noir claimed the top spot. Wine Enthusiast’s tasters reviewed more than 22,000 wines, designating 3,800 as Best Buys.
The success is particularly sweet because the winemaking team is still reeling from the devastating 2020 harvest, in which wildfires blanketed Oregon with smoke right at harvest. Smoke can permeate grapes, leading to undesirable flavors known as “smoke taint.” King Estate harvested 10% of its typical tonnage that year, with no fruit harvested from its estate vineyard.
“Two days into harvest, the smoke came,” Stone said, referring to the Labor Day fires that hit during tinder-dry drought conditions and prompted air quality alerts around the state. “You spent all year growing those grapes, getting ready to harvest, and then the fires hit. I will never complain about a long, hard harvest again, because it can get taken from you so quickly.”
King Estate Winery
80854 Territorial Hwy.
541-942-9874
