…We’ll get to playing God with grapes in a bit. First, that context. “We’re gonna taste through the icons of the valley,” Lewis says as we pull up to the Atticus Hotel in McMinnville, Willamette’s thriving little town with a main street out of a Rockwell painting. In a private room off the lobby, he and Alexana’s head winemaker, Tresider “Tres” Burns, uncork, pour, and talk through pinots from legends like Hyland Estates, Elk Cove, and Eyrie, whose founder, David Lett, is considered the valley’s viticultural godfather.

Seated at a long table with a Renaissance centerpiece of local cheese, charcuterie, nuts, and dried fruits, our group includes a Brazilian antitrust attorney, the former chief of staff of a U.S. senator, a cardiologist from L.A., and a toilet magnate from Dallas. Everyone has a different favorite from the icons tasting.

The 2019 Estate Reserve from Ribbon Ridge, a father-​daughter winery from the valley’s tiniest AVA (American Viticultural Area), fascinates me with its voluptuous blackberry expression tinged with wet earth and cookie spices. Burns finds the vintage a little “nervous,” and I laugh through a mouthful of Oregon hazelnuts. I love talking with wine-industry people because they talk like writers, and over the course of three days, our group talks to a lot of wine-industry people….

And while these exclusive interactions are all fun and hedonic and, sure, maybe include a bit of bragging rights, they are more so in the service of building that critical context that will help us dial into the blending session at Alexana.

“As you make your blend, you want to look for things you want to highlight,” Alexana’s cellar master, Tim Holst, explains. On the winery’s cavernous production floor, we’re sitting at a table covered in empty wine glasses and bottles, graduated cylinders, and four young pinots from different clones and different vineyards on the property. “Are you looking for more oak inclusion or more acid? Do you want things to be fruit-forward?” The white tablecloth becomes increasingly wine-splotched as I try to answer Holst’s questions and create a pinot suited to my palette.

Burns talks through each of the four blending wines, starting with the Block 7 Pommard clone from 2022, a roller-coaster year that saw a catastrophic late-spring frost, perfect summer, and the hottest October on record, which triggered an early, hypercompressed harvest over 17 days. “It was nail-biting,” Burns remembers, “but the vines ended up rebounding a really interesting way—creating the biggest clusters we’ve seen.”

Bigger grapes = higher juice-to-skin ratio = lighter-bodied wines. Coupled with the lower alcohol content from the early harvest, I know the Block 7 Pommard would be the foundation of exactly the type of Pinot Noir I love to drink: easygoing, young, and vividly juicy.

I taste and scribble some notes on the placemat: Basket of raspberries and cherries, Light strawberry rose violet nose, Honey and heather, Too lightweight on its own need to strengthen. And strengthen I do. To a base of half Block 7 Pommard, I add 30 percent of my second favorite of the four wines, a Block 21 Coury clone with a beguiling maple nose, followed by 10 percent each of Block 19 Pommard (feisty, higher alcohol, crusted like a prime rib with green and black peppercorns) and Dijon 114 Block 14 (astringent and acidic, my least favorite of the four).

I swirl the blend in a bottle, pour a glass, and taste: Too spicy, too tart. Holst and Lewis taste and recommend increasing the Dijon and decreasing the Block 7 Pommard—counterintuitive to my notes!—and the morning unspools with milliliter-by-milliliter tinkering. “[Blending] is like how a painter has a palette they can use to create the masterpiece,” Evans says, but as much as artistry and instinct inform style, so do science and craftsmanship.

I find my way to a blend I love around noon, primarily Coury (40 percent) with less Pommard 7 (35 percent), more Dijon than I thought I could tolerate (15 percent), and a dash of Pommard 19 (10 percent). My wine has the Softer tannins of the young pinots I prefer but also a Stronger structure, with most of the ripe berry notes dethroned by Blacklicorice and Anise. It’s completely delicious, but perhaps more importantly surprising.

Evans, who makes 10–15 wines a year, probably could have predicted this. “I start out with [a plan], but almost always I have to throw that out,” he says with a laugh. “I’m a big believer that you’ve gotta let wine tell you where to go.”