Firesteed Cellars

Do you enjoy a good rags-to-riches story that’s downright American and inspiring? We’ve got one, and it belongs to Firesteed Cellars.

With its case production now at 80,000 cases per year, Firesteed Cellars ranks in the top five of Oregon wine producers. To understand how Firesteed accomplished this, you need to turn the clock back to the early 1990s, when the public’s thirst for affordable red wine hit a new high. Howard Rossbach, owner and founder of Firesteed Cellars, heard the plea and set about sharpening his pencil. He developed long-term contracts with Oregon pinot growers, identified a production facility with excess capacity, and found a winemaker consultant with time on his hand. The result? An everyday, quality pinot noir priced in the midteens and ready to be taken home and enjoyed the day it’s purchased.

It didn’t hurt that Howard came up with superior packaging. The label on the Firesteed Cellars is distinctive, looking like it belongs on a bottle of pinot three times the price.

So it was on a hot August day that we arrived at the Firesteed Cellars tasting room and winery 13 miles west of Salem on Hwy. 99W. Once inside the facility, you can’t help but marvel at a massive wall of Firesteed Cellars wines stacked 15 cases high and 30 cases wide. That’s a lot of pinot. Then you head to the cordoned “tasting room,” where a talented interior designer somehow succeeded in making the area feel intimate. This is where you discover that Firesteed Cellars makes more than its everyday pinot noir, offering “more complex” pinot noirs, with higher price tags, such as a pinot gris, a pinot noir rosé, a Bordeaux-style red table wine, and its Italian-produced Barbera d’Asti. At only $12 a bottle for the red blend and barbera, visitors can find in these wines a respite from our economic woes.

And what foods pair well with these wines? I recommend checking out Martha Stewart’s website (www.marthastewart.com) — OK, I confess that I’ve visited the site on occasion — to get her recipe for Spiced Butterflied Leg of Lamb, which features an anise-scented rub and fragrant olive oil. In pairing the lamb with a Firesteed Cellars Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, my only issue is having to wait until the lamb is ready before I enjoy a glass of this wine. Talk about a case of premature pairing!