Willamette Valley Is Becoming America’s Reference Point for Traditional Method Sparkling Wine

Once a niche category led by a handful of pioneers, Oregon’s Champagne-style fizz is now scaling up—powered by shared production, deep technical know-how, and a new quality standard called Method Oregon.

Oregon’s Willamette Valley has long been respected for producing luscious Chardonnays and elegant Pinot Noirs, and is frequently compared to Burgundy for its cool climate, rolling hills, and latitude. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are also two of the key grapes in Champagne, but for many years, only a handful of wineries, including Argyle Winery, R. Stuart, and Soter Vineyards, made méthode champenoise sparkling wine on a commercial scale.

That’s all changing. Over the past decade, Willamette Valley winemakers have picked up their sabers in a traditional method sparkling wine revolution. New sparkling wine consortium Method Oregon estimates that Oregon wineries are now producing 150,000 cases of traditional method sparkling annually. That’s still a small number compared to other premier sparkling regions around the world, but production in Oregon has more than quadrupled over the past decade.

How Oregon Producers Are Making it Work

There are two major obstacles to making sparkling wine: It requires expensive, specialized equipment, and it is a much more technical process than producing still wine. 

“There are so many barriers to entry into the sparkling wine industry,” says Method Oregon co-founder Jeanne Feldkamp of Corollary Wines, a new winery that produces sparkling wine exclusively. Method Oregon is a new collaborative effort among winemakers to elevate Oregon sparkling wine on the global stage and continue raising the bar on quality, responsible farming practices, and specificity of place. “On top of the intense competition, the regulatory complexity, and the multi-year production cycle, sparkling production at scale requires some eye-poppingly expensive equipment for riddling and disgorging, or a huge amount of labor.” To reduce the financial risk, Feldkamp turned to Andrew Davis and Radiant Sparkling Wine as a partner. 

No man has had a greater impact on Willamette Valley’s second wave of small-production sparkling wine than Davis, founder of Radiant Sparkling Wine Company. Since launching Radiant in 2014, Davis has worked with more than 50 different wineries, providing the specialized equipment needed to produce world-class sparkling wine, and guiding winemakers producing their first ever sparkling wines with a technical prowess honed during nearly a decade working alongside Rollin Soles at Argyle Winery.

“The realm of sparkling wine is broad and deep, and Radiant is open to promoting the creativity of the industry, rather than creating a homogeneous ‘Oregon sparkling,’” Davis says. The vast majority of sparkling wines made in the Willamette Valley, including from Corollary Wines, Lytle-Barnett, Bryn Mawr, Willamette Valley Vineyards, and LucidWild, are made in partnership with Radiant.

“During the last decade, these new producers have been slowly finding their own house expressions of these new sparkling wines,” Davis says. He posits that Oregon producers are excelling in sparkling wine production because their still wines have a “racy acidity” that makes for a natural transition to sparkling wine.

Bryn Mawr Vineyards released their inaugural sparkling wine in 2024 to great acclaim, a 2018 blanc de noirs that was aged for five years en tirage. Winemaker Rachel Rose felt more confident working with Radiant to ensure success from the start.

“It takes years to develop a wine program and sound protocols, and with the slow turnaround of sparkling wine, you might not know you’ve made a mistake until five-plus years and multiple vintages,” Rose says. “It made sense to work with a specialized company to avoid losing the years of work, time, and money we had invested.” While they only made 240 cases of their first vintage, they now have around 2,000 cases of sparkling wine en tirage. Rose hopes to continue exploring fermenting the base wine with ambient yeast to achieve a wider array of aromas and flavors, and she is also interested in including more estate fruit in the blanc de noirs. “I think a 100% organically certified Bryn Mawr Estate sparkling wine would be very compelling.”

For Feldkamp, working with Radiant means she has a predictable cost for that portion of the production process, and with just herself and her partner Dan in the cellar, they have no plans to purchase their own equipment. “Our core competencies are winemaking and growing the brand, not maintenance and operation of highly specialized equipment,” she says.

The Outlier: Arabilis Goes All In

Not everyone is working with Radiant though. One of the most prominent outliers is Arabilis, another sparkling wine specialist. Husband-and-wife team Kenny and Allison McMahon have invested nearly $1 million in automatic end-to-end sparkling wine production equipment, including a pneumatic press, a tirage bottling line, gyro pallets for riddling, and a disgorging line in what they characterize as a “long, incremental, very scrappy build.”

Kenny McMahon, winemaker and co-owner at Arabilis Wines, earned a PhD in food science from Washington State University and wrote his dissertation on tirage and dosage in sparkling wine. Arabilis is a passion project with his wife Allison, also a food science PhD. The couple hopes to one day plant their own Chardonnay vineyards in the Eola-Amity Hills or Van Duzer AVAs.

McMahon has many winemaker friends in Champagne, including fourth-generation winemaker Guillaume Doyard, whom he describes as “a brother,” and from whom he has learned a lot. He compares the Van Duzer Corridor to Montagne de Reims and sees similarities between the Eola Hills and Côte des Blancs. He’s also trying something that is very unusual in the United States, but common practice in Champagne: aging wine under cork rather than crown caps.

“There’s a sensorial benefit and heightened amplitude when you age under cork,” McMahon says. It’s more work, and requires disgorging by hand, but McMahon believes it’s worth it to create a more complex and precise sparkling wine. “We pick a little riper for a fresher, more intense long finish.”

Method Oregon and What Comes Next

Feldkamp says that Oregon sparkling wine has reached a tipping point. “Now, after decades of exploration and innovation, a fast-growing group of dedicated winemakers across the state are producing world-class traditional method sparkling wines that are among the best in the world.” Last year, Feldkamp helped establish Method Oregon, and while the requirements are still being fine-tuned, it aims to represent one of the most rigorous standards in the world for traditional method sparkling production. “When consumers see the Method Oregon mark on a bottle, we want them to understand it as a symbol of exceptional quality, deep care for the land, and strong community,” Feldkamp says. This year’s Method Oregon Grand Tasting Weekend will be July 24–-26, 2026. Educational activities and food pairings will play an important role, with the event expanding to multiple venues, and à la carte tickets giving guests the flexibility to dive deep into their interests and their favorite wineries.