Foris, Pinot Noir, Rogue Valley AVA

Foris is one of the early pioneers of the Oregon Pinot Noir wine industry, founded by Ted Gerber in 1971—long before Oregon wine had a reputation, a playbook, or a sense of hierarchy. This is not the part of Oregon you think you know. There are no postcard rows of Willamette Valley vineyards here, no familiar signposts or shorthand. Instead, Foris sits in the far southwest corner of the state, in a rugged, quietly dramatic landscape of rolling green hills, dense forests, and open sky—about 30 miles from the Pacific Ocean and just seven miles from the California border. This is the Rogue Valley: a place defined by cool air, forest edges, and distance—both literal and cultural—from the centers of attention. The wines that emerge from here carry a classic Oregon sensibility, but with a wilder, more independent soul—exceptionally hard to put down, with a level of price-to-quality that feels almost unheard of for Pinot Noir this authentic.

Oregon’s wine story is most often told through the Willamette Valley, where the state’s earliest Pinot Noir plantings took hold in the 1960s and ’70s and eventually defined its global reputation. But Foris was an anomaly from the beginning. Rather than follow the migration north, it took root in the Rogue River Valley—an AVA shaped by complex topography, varied elevations, and a mosaic of soils including decomposed granite, ancient alluvial deposits, clay loam, and gravelly river terraces. Warm days are balanced by cool nights and maritime air pushing inland, creating wines with both ripeness and lift, structure and fragrance—Pinot Noir that feels complete without excess.

The history of Foris is not one of instant success, but of stubborn belief and slow accumulation. When Ted Gerber arrived in southern Oregon in 1971, there were no wineries, no commercial vineyards, and no precedent—just land, weather records, and conviction. He and his wife bought property in the Illinois Valley knowing it wasn’t known for grapes, but it placed them where they needed to be to find the right site. They built a house, sold it, and moved again—guided by forty years of temperature data from the Smoke Jumper Station in Cave Junction and ripening records from the experiment station in Jacksonville. The advice that brought them here was blunt and practical: move to Oregon, you can get started with a strong back and little money. That described them exactly. The back-to-the-land idealism of the era faded quickly—self-sufficiency came with real discomforts—but the vision for wine never did.

Foris was built by bootstrapping in the truest sense. In the 1980s and early ’90s, Meri Gerber—Ted’s late wife—created a grape-wreath business using vineyard prunings, eventually supporting hundreds of customers and employing local women who could work from home while raising their children. Those same prunings, along with a nursery business selling rooted vines, provided the cash flow to plant vineyards and slowly bring a winery to life. Then came a quiet turning point: a handful of Pinot Noir vines mistakenly mixed into Chardonnay plantings. The early wines were terrible—but the idea stayed. When Oregon State released Dijon clones, selected for wine quality rather than disease resistance, Foris moved immediately, propagating a few dozen plants into ten acres almost overnight. By the early 1990s, they were so far ahead that California grafters came calling, buying prunings after being taught what a Dijon clone even was. For a brief moment, Foris was helping supply the future of American Pinot Noir.

Even the water here tells the same story. Beneath the property run 19th-century mining tunnels carved by hand to extract gold—four or five men working for nearly a decade to dig the Emerald Tunnel alone. Today, that same tunnel supplies pristine water to the winery, house, and gardens by gravity alone, no pump required. It’s an almost perfect metaphor for Foris itself: nothing forced, everything earned, sustained by work done long before anyone knew what it would become.

The 2024 Pinot Noir is pure, elegant, and deeply expressive of place. Aromas of red cherry and wild strawberry are joined by cool-toned blueberry, pine needle, damp bark, and fern—evoking the unmistakable scent of a cold forest on a winter morning walk. The palate is supple and balanced, with bright acidity, fine-grained tannins, and a savory undertone that keeps you reaching for another sip. At the table, this is the ultimate roast chicken wine for a Tuesday night, equally at home with mushrooms, grilled salmon, or wild game. Decant for 30 minutes and serve just above cellar temperature in large Burgundy stems. The bottle will be gone quickly—trust me—so have a second close by.