Elizabeth's Reserve: The Story Behind the Icon
Get the full story behind this historic label from the man himself, David Adelsheim.
“By the time we were in our ninth vintage - in 1986 – we understood that we had a wide range of wine quality in the different lots of Pinot noir we had in barrel. Some of this variability was by vineyard source, but even within a vineyard, like what we now call Quarter Mile Lane, there were big differences between the two large blocks.
Ginny Adelsheim
Also, after the national acclaim from writers like Robert Parker for Oregon’s 1983 and 1985 vintages, Ginny and I believed we could sell a second, more elevated and complex wine alongside our Oregon Pinot noir. So, as we were assembling the barrels into the final wines in the summer of 1987, we created two Pinot noirs – a large amount of the Oregon PN and a smaller amount of a better wine, based on block 1 of Quarter Mile Lane, but blended with a slightly larger quantity from Allen Holstein’s vineyard in the Dundee Hills. We were still bottling and labeling wines as two separate operations. So the better, more expensive wine sat in its boxes without labels.
In January of 1987, our whole family and our winemaker, Don Kautzner, went to Burgundy at the invitation of the Drouhin family. At the end of that visit, we ended up in Florence, visiting our friends Barbara and Bob Pickett. A week later, Lizzie, Don and I returned to Oregon. But Ginny stayed with Barbara and Bob to do research for a series of bas relief terra cotta sculptures she had been commissioned to create for the Town Club in Portland, a historic building of Italian Renaissance design. While studying Florentine Renaissance sculpture, Ginny saw an exhibit of work by Andrea del Sarto, a painter from the late Renaissance. She was particularly intrigued by the charcoal and conté crayon sketches he did in preparation for paintings and frescoes. They were powerful and simple. These expressive, timeless drawings were the inspiration for her approach to the portrait label of Elizabeth’s Reserve.
We decided the label for the more expensive wine should look different from the labels she had created for our previously released wines. We can't remember when we decided to name the wine after our daughter, Elizabeth (Lizzie) and when Ginny decided to draw Lizzie on that label. Was it before we were in Italy; was it when Ginny saw the del Sarto exhibit while there; or was it when she brought a huge book of Andrea del Sarto sketches back to Portland? In any case, she photographed Lizzie in the Fall of 1987, when Lizzie was starting Kindergarten, and began doing sketches from life and from those photos. One of the challenges was that she was drawing a portrait of a six year-old to put on a wine label. A contemporaneous label for the Bonny Doon Moscato, with a cartoon-like drawing of a mother and young daughter, was banned by the State of Washington because that label clearly “encouraged underage drinking.” So Ginny chose the profile portrait because Lizzie looked more mature from that angle.
Over the months into the spring of 1988, she did many drawings, eventually focusing on the left-facing profile. By summer of 1988, the drawing was done and the work of making it into a label was turned over to her sister, Corinna, who is a graphic designer. It took several months to decide on typefaces and the label layout. In August the label was printed and applied to bottles of the premiere 1986 vintage, which were released for sale.
Just as mysterious is the wine name, “Elizabeth’s Reserve.” Ginny and I wanted to honor a person from the new generation on the label of a new generation of wine. Not surprisingly, Lizzie was our top choice and a convenient model. And honoring a close family member on a wine was not unknown – though this wine may have been the first in the US to honor a daughter. Why not “Elizabeth’s Vineyard?” Our first, and at that time only, vineyard had not yet been named “Quarter Mile Lane” vineyard. However, the rationale behind creating single vineyard Pinot noirs was not yet understood. And in any case, our first venture into a more expensive wine was not a single vineyard wine. The words “Cuvée” and “Blend” could have been used, but “Reserve” was used by several of California’s most admired wineries to name their top wine. So the name “Elizabeth’s Reserve” was what we chose.
At the third IPNC (in July 1989) Alex Sebastian, owner of the Wooden Angel Restaurant in Beaver PA, gave a speech about the future for Oregon Pinot noir and used the first Elizabeth’s Reserve as the example for others to follow.