Published 7:00 am Thursday, September 10, 2020
Springhill Cellars wine grapes were initially planted in 1978, which owner and winemaker Mike McLain acknowledges was also a “very good year” for him.
Not only did he join the fledgling Oregon wine industry with those Albany, Ore.-area grapevine plantings, but McLain said he “got out of journalism.” He was then owner and editor of the Coburg Countryman newspaper. He also married his wife, Karen — and quit smoking.
McLain’s father and mother, Harold and Lillian, purchased the original plot of land in 1972, and the planting of winegrapes was begun six years later. Springhill Cellars was founded in 1988 by Mike and Karen, along with Karen’s father, Merv Anthony.
McLain, 68, does all the winemaking for the Pinot noir, Pinot gris, Port-style (from Pinot noir grapes), Saignée (a pre-fermentation ‘bleed’ of Pinot noir) and other wines produced at Springhill. McLain uses the French method of barrel-aging his Pinot offerings, with each aged for a year.
Only about 1,000 to 1,200 cases of wine are produced each year at the small-acreage vineyard and winery.
Grapes are sourced from the Springhill Cellars Estate Vineyard south of the winery and tasting room and his residence. The grapes were planted from 1978 through 1990. The family now has “about two-thirds of an acre of Pinot noir grapes left on the ‘home/winery’ parcel,’” McLain said.
Grapes from the McLain Vineyard, a 12-acre block near Hopewell in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA and planted from 1997 to 2000, are also used for his wines.
Springhill is one of 17 family-owned, small, artisan-style wineries in the central Willamette Valley from Independence south to the Monroe-Alpine area that form the Heart of Willamette Wineries organization. It is also a member of state and local winery organizations.
McLain has also been a real estate broker for 40 years as the founder of McLain & Associates Vineyard Properties, which he says is one of the oldest firms specializing in vineyard and winery property in the Willamette Valley.
As a new real estate broker, “I had to start out learning what the heck land suited to vineyards was,” McLain said. “That took research, the kind of thing I learned being a journalist.”
He and his wife met while both worked at the University of Oregon’s independent student newspaper, The Emerald, in the mid-1970s.
McLain’s younger son, Connor, 29, runs the tasting room and manages the small on-site vineyard. Their other son, Neil, 35, works on the opposite side of Oregon’s burgeoning adult-beverage industry as a brewer.
McLain said the winery is small by Oregon Pinot standards and will continue to concentrate on the two Pinot varieties, along with the port and the Rosé.
