If you've ever had the pleasure of hearing Mimi Casteel speak, perhaps at a lecture on wine sustainability, in a live clip from Oregon Pinot Camp, or on one of the most-listened-to episodes of I'll Drink To That ever recorded, you know that listening to Mimi and falling under her spell are one in the same. 

A champion of sustainability, Mimi has the amazing ability to seize the wine industry's attention and call us to action while also connecting with the public, infusing everyone around her with both urgency and empowered hope. Having grown up in the Willamette Valley as the younger daughter of Bethel Heights cofounders Ted Casteel and Pat Dudley, honed her environmental science passion with a master's in Forest Ecology, and developed her farming practices at Bethel Heights, Mimi founded her own project, Hope Well, in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in 2015. She was soon producing some of the most sought-after fruit in Oregon.

During the pandemic, Mimi made the difficult decision to sell her original Hope Well vineyard; the challenge of farming and selling fruit on such a large property ultimately drew too much of her focus away from her family and her own wines. Mimi and her family (along with their herd of animals) settled into a new home, a 10-acre site in the foothills of the Coast Range. Mimi now has a a long-term lease on 3 acres between Bethel Heights and Jackson Family’s Zena Crown vineyard, still in her very own Eola-Amity Hills. The vines of the new Hope Well vineyard were grafted with budwood from the original site and the grapes grown on this land will solely be used for the wines of Hope Well. After all, Mimi's vision for a more sustainable world was never meant to only apply to a single site—it is, and should always be, a global movement.

Perhaps most exciting, Mimi has grafted from her old site and planted at this site her beloved Chenin Blanc grape. I was able to chat with Mimi over zoom in late September 2024, just before her own harvest started, about Chenin Blanc in Oregon, the best part of making wine in the Willamette Valley, and some very French advice from Francois Chidaine.

Julia Burke: Thank you so much for making time so close to harvest! Can you tell me the story that led you up to this point?
Mimi Casteel: We moved site back in 2022 and the site that I moved to was all Pinot Noir organically farmed. It had been separately fenced and so I can have my sheep in there and it all kind of worked perfectly. But it was two clonal selections of Pinot Noir that I don't really love. It's Swan and Calera, and I love them in California, but in Oregon they're insanely low yielding and it was just ridiculous. So we grafted everything in March and April of 2022. And we took the Chenin Blanc bud wood from the previous site, and then a selection of the Pinot Noir clones that we had there. It was a really terrifying experience actually, because it was a significant expense and a crazy risk to take. 

We got into late May, bud break was happening all over the Valley and we were just sitting there and it just looked like dead wood. I thought perhaps the whole entire thing had failed. And then there was a terrible frost in Oregon in 2022 and a lot of people lost their primary shoots and I still had nothing. But that's what saved everything because a month later, it's the end of June and we've got little shoots coming out everywhere. I mean, usually in your first graft year you might see one or two clusters per plant, but we actually had a decent crop. I was just sure it wouldn't ripen because we were a solid month and a half behind and it was a kind of a cool year. But then we ended up having just the most insanely beautiful October. 

So the following year we had a beautiful crop on everything. And so in 2023 we made both the Pinot Noir and a standalone Chenin Blanc. This new site is much closer to where I grew up and feels very familiar to me. Our daytime is very short compared to the previous site; at this site we start getting cool right around four or five o'clock in the afternoon. We had such incredible hangtime and beautiful cool temperatures. So we harvested, again right at the tail end of the season. And this is what I love about cool climate wines, when you get to the last second of that nice weather and things are just perfectly ripe. The flavors are always just perfection. So I'm really excited about this Chenin Blanc from 2023, in terms of getting to know the site and getting a sense of where it's going to be able to go with Chenin Blanc. Our alcohols were super moderate and the flavors were excellent and it fermented beautifully. 2023 I think for a lot of people was sort of a goldilocks vintage where you got a lot of nice picking days and windows. But we were right up against the wire for the Chenin and we pulled that on the last possible day that we could.

JB: I'm so pumped about seeing you doing Chenin Blanc. The grape has so many incredible Loire examples, and some amazing South African examples. Do you have reference points in your mind for this wine? What do you think of Chenin Blanc in Oregon specifically?

MC: You know, it's funny because I don't know if you ever heard the stories, but we had Chenin Blanc at Bethel Heights back in like 1984. And so when I was still at Bethel Heights and Ben and I would do library tastings and open some of the older wines, we never kept any of those bottles; some people felt like it was one of those wines you would only ever be able to charge $8 a bottle for and people wanted it to be really sweet. But we found a case of Chenin Blanc from 1985 and the wines should have been terrible, but they were stunning. I mean, just stunning.

The Loire is my gold standard, but then I also agree with you wholeheartedly that South Africa for Chenin Blanc is kind of blowing my mind. But I think in Oregon, what we have going for us specifically for Chenin Blanc, and it's one of the reasons that I decided to work with Chenin Blanc instead of Chardonnay, is that really powerful solar day that we have. We talk about being a cool climate but we're still Mediterranean during the summer so you need something that kind of wants that big warm window but likes a cool night. In Oregon I feel like we can have that that nice curve of generosity, but with a cut, and that's what I love about Chenin Blanc. When it's really, really good, it, it's just so dynamic and so nimble in terms of what it can pair with and how long it can age. So it was an easy choice for me. 

JB: I understand Francois Chidaine gave you some Chenin Blanc advice? 

MC: Yeah, it's very funny. He's a big hero of mine and I just love his temperament and I love the wines from one year to the next, I just feel like he has such an intuition that I called him and I was like, do you have any advice for me? His advice was: "When you think it's ready? Wait two more weeks." And I mean, you can imagine, I certainly don't subscribe to that philosophy with Pinot Noir or anything like that so I asked him why. And he was very French about it. That was just the way it was, you don't question it. And in that first year I did pick it when I thought it was ready and I went through and I made a selection of what I thought was ready and fermented that and then two weeks later we went through and we picked, and then another two weeks later, we went through and got the first Hunter's Moon pick. And he was totally, frustratingly right. 

So now I've talked with other folks who have taken some of my bud wood and grafted their own vineyards to try some Chenin Blanc in Oregon, and I give them the same advice. "When you think it's ready, you're wrong." There's something that happens, I think it's got to be something with the skins because it gets very bizarrely reductive, like, not in a good way, if you pick it too soon. Oregonians don't like to be told to wait beyond what they think is the ready date. So they've all come to find out the hard way. 

JB: So knowing that now, what are you looking for when you are tasting in the vineyard to determine a pick date? How do you correct for that?

MC: I have kind of triangulated down to thinking that it has something to do with the texture of the skin. Because what's fascinating about the Chenin especially if you look at our estate is the analytics don't change much. It sits in this parking lot for weeks or a whole entire month sometimes. And the only thing that really changes is the texture and the caliber of the skin. The skin gives up so much more flavor, you actually have to sort of chew on the berries and get that texture to see the difference. At least that's what I've convinced myself is the difference. It's such a cool grape to work with. I really, I think if I could only drink one white wine for the rest of my life, it would be Chenin.

JB: Do you foresee leaning more toward settling into a style or just responding to the vintage every year in terms of various winemaking techniques? Because Chenin can kind of take them all?

MC: I'll follow where I think the vintage needs to go. I don't ever want to feel like I've learned everything there is to know and I'm still learning from Pinot Noir, and I think Chenin might even be like a longer lifetime for me because I grew up with Pinot Noir. And I feel like we really do need, right now more than ever, to be open-minded about what techniques are gonna meet the changing world and how these wines will find their best window every single vintage.

JB: If Chenin Blanc were to take off in Oregon, would you want there to be an annual technical tasting like there is for Chardonnay? In other words, what's the key to quality when a new grape enters the ring in a place where there's such a strong flagship held to such a high standard?

MC: I will say, to anybody who's asked for bud wood, I'm happily sharing it. But as to your very good question about this the sort of technical tasting aspect, it is one of the things that I think we do really well in Oregon: we get together and we taste things very blindly and with a lot of just vulnerability about whatever problems people have had. And I think that that's been really useful and helpful, but there's a danger in that as well because I think that when there is a new grape that people are exploring and experimenting with it, you have to sort of push outside of the envelope to achieve new heights. I like to think that with those new great varieties, we're starting to challenge the assumptions that helped get us where we are. We need to challenge each other to be as good as we possibly can be, but be experimental and find those house styles that really become iconic. 

Every time we think we've gotten to a place where we figure things out, the world has changed. And so you need to go back and say, ok, that worked then and now it's not working anymore. So let's admit that we can change and meet the new world. Otherwise it will be a lot less interesting for everyone. 

JB: You really can't buy that long end-of-season glory we have in the best parts of the Willamette Valley. I taste wines sometimes from areas where people are just picking super early to try to get like this nice fresh style, sometimes even in places that are sometimes legitimately cool sites, and I wonder, do they have to do that?

MC: They don't! And I think again, that becomes one of those stories that we tell ourselves that maybe were true in that moment. But for them to have to just hold on to a story as opposed to building a new story... I don't know, that would be a heartbreak for me. One of the best things about Oregon to me at its best is that long, slow end of the season and that super long runway. I mean, you know what it's like in Oregon, when, when the angle of the light shifts and like everything is that golden hue and there's just that smell and I just, I want all of that, like sort of soaking into what's gonna happen in the bottle this year. And so I hang on until the last possible moment, as long as we're in that beautiful sweet spot.