A Special Recipe from Northwest Knits and Eats

We're honored to be featured in a new book by Susan Gehringer, knitting and food aficionado (and a wine club member!). Her book Northwest Knits and Eats features five wineries in the Pacific Northwest, each with a paired recipe and knitting pattern. It's a fun book, filled with fun knitting patterns, delicious recipes, and several fantastic wineries from Washington and Oregon; we're so excited to be one of them!

Susan's theme for the Torii Mor chapter was the coast. The book features a beautiful shawl pattern and a delicious salmon dinner paired with our 2011 Olson Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir, perfect for a seaside dinner at the Oregon coast.

You can buy the book from Susan's website, Grist Creative and be sure to stop by our tasting rooms for a special book signing and knit-a-long! Join us at the Dundee tasting room on Sunday, Oct 2, 5-8 pm, and Thursday, Oct 20, 5-8pm, in Woodinville.

And in celebration of this fantastic new release, we're featuring a special recipe from the book! 

This delicious rice pilaf will pair nicely with salmon, chicken, and of course a glass of your favorite Torii Mor Pinot Noir! 

Wild Rice with Cranberries from Northwest Knits & Eats

1 c. wild rice

2 Tbl. butter

½ c. sweet onion, finely chopped

2½ c. water

½ c. dried cranberries, chopped

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. cracked black pepper

zest of ½ lemon, minced

1 tsp. fresh lemon juice

Toast wild rice in a pan over medium heat for 3-5 minutes, remove from heat and place in bowl, set aside.
Melt butter and add onion, cooking until translucent.
Add rice, water, cranberries, salt, and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until rice is tender, approximately 60 minutes or as instructed by the package directions. During cooking, add more water if needed to keep rice from scorching.
When rice is finished cooking, stir in lemon zest and lemon juice.

craving more? get the book at www.gristcreative.com

Why You Need Single Vineyard Pinot Noirs in Your Cellar

There are a million reasons why every home cellar should have a few single vineyard Pinot Noirs. Not only are they a unique addition to your cellar, they're the sort of wine that can easily elevate a weeknight dinner or the perfect pair for a fancy dinner party. With a chameleon-like ability to pair with most any event, single vineyards should be a necessity in your cellar. Today, we're highlighting five reasons why you should have these special gems in your home cellar. 

• Sense of Place - Wine has the ability to transport you around the world, but no wine does that better than a Single Vineyard Pinot Noir. Each vineyard is unique, with different elevations, different microclimates, different dirt, different views. Enjoying a single vineyard wine takes you back to the vineyard from where it came, and allows you to imagine yourself back in the Willamette Valley, nestled among the vines.
• Distinct Flavors and Aromas - When you blend a variety of grapes or clones together, you can create truly beautiful blends. But when you can feature one specific vineyard location, with its specific grape and specific clones, you're able to experience the depths of flavor and aroma that wine offers. Nothing else will give you such variety or flexibility as a Single Vineyard Pinot Noir. Vineyard to vineyard and vintage to vintage, single vineyard wines offer more variety for your cellar so you're always prepared when a night requires wine.
• Showcases Variety in a Grape - every wine grape has several clones, sort of like different breeds of the grape. Pinot Noir has over 40 different clones, each with different characteristics that add quality or flavor to the wine they make. Each vineyard owner plants different clones, so when you drink a single vineyard, you're not only enjoying a specific vineyard, you're also getting a peek into the mindset and preferences of the vineyard owner and what grapes he or she thinks are the best of the best.
• Limited Releases and Availability - Since single vineyard wines come from one vineyard, the amount of wine able to be produced is very limited. When grapes come from a 5, 10, or 25-acre vineyard, the wine produced are small lots. For our single vineyard Pinot Noirs at Torii Mor, we only produce about 150-200 cases of each wine. They start by going to the club, and whatever is left over is released to the public. 
• DIY Verticals - A fun trait of single vineyard wines is you have the ability to create your own verticals. As you add to your collection, you'll begin to notice the vineyards that you like and enjoy the most. You can create your own verticals by collecting the single vineyard from each vintage it is released. Another fun tasting experience is gathering a few bottles of wine from a few different vineyards who all source fruit from the same vineyard.   
• Limited Grapes - Sometimes a single vineyard wine is the only way to get a wine made of grapes from a certain vineyard. Quite a few vineyards don't make their own wines and focus only on selling their grapes to winemakers. When you buy a single vineyard featuring grapes from sites like these, you're getting a small piece of a very limited puzzle. These are especially unique additions to your cellar! 

And what single vineyard wines does Torii Mor make you might ask? We have a great variety! Whether you love the funk of the Alloro, the bold Olalla and La Colina, or the ever-changing Nysa, we have something for you. 

 

Torii Mor Welcomes a Baby

Torii Mor welcomed a new baby this June! Nichole, our Woodinville Tasting Room Manager, welcomed her first child, an adorable baby boy named Gabriel. Enjoy the photos and be sure to congratulate her when you see her in the tasting room! 

Torii Mor Blog's One Year Anniversary!

It's been one year since we started our blog for Torii Mor. We've had so much fun sharing our inspiration, our antics, and special sneak peeks to you all year long. Today we're doing a roundup of our favorite blog posts from the past year.

We've had a variety of posts on this blog, from wine pairings to vintage reviews, from event details to gift guides, we've posted a little bit of everything. 

One of the most loved blog posts was our Halloween Wine and Candy Pairing post. Who doesn't love an excuse to enjoy Halloween candy and wine together? 

Our gift guides were also a huge hit. Whether you needed ideas for Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, or Father's Day. We had you covered. 

Do you love the technical knowledge of the wine world? We had posts on everything from filtration to harvest, but the posts on Aging Wine and Big Bottles were the biggest hits. 

And we can't the vintage posts. Oregon is special for many reasons, but something that makes our wine so distinct is the variety our vintages bring to every bottle. We detailed the 2013 Vintage and the 2014 Vintage last year! 

And of course, we had to do a few travel posts for out of towners. Get Outside in the Willamette Valley offered ideas for a variety of activities to explore everything the valley has to offer.