The Origin of 00
Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on volcanic basalt and old seabed, bottled vineyard by vineyard.
Founded by a European-Oregon family, living between two worlds.
00 Wines founder Chris Hermann grew up in the Willamette Valley in the sixties and seventies, trailing his European-born father through the first vineyards planted here. Dr. Richard Hermann taught forestry and botany at Oregon State University, so the conversation at the dinner table was usually about soil and climate. Later it was about white Burgundy, which they both loved, and about whether Oregon would ever put a Chardonnay on the table that could sit beside one without apology.
For years the answer was no. Chris and his wife Kathryn Hermann founded 00 Wines with Richard in 2015 to pioneer a new path in the Willamette Valley that focused on traditionally made European-style Chardonnay and classical Pinot Noir: two zeroes for the two grapes. They committed to using only the highest quality available fruit, natural corks, and lightly toasted oak barrels produced in Meursault to elevate the classical grapes of Burgundy in their new home as immigrants in the American frontier, where all things are possible. Since then, their wines have been exported to 12 countries, won numerous awards, and have become a benchmark for the emerging Chardonnay revolution in the Pacific Northwest.
Founded in Carlton, Oregon
Volcanic basalt and marine sedimentary, in one valley
No tasting room. Everything is sold here.
Precision is a farming decision.
Almost everything that decides what a wine can become has happened before the fruit reaches the door. The cellar can protect it or damage it. It cannot add what was never grown. That makes the question of who farms the most consequential one we ask all year, and it isn’t a question we reopen every vintage. These are long relationships with families who were working this ground before we got here.
Chehalem Mountain Vineyard was planted in 1969 by Dick Erath. It was the third vineyard in the Willamette Valley, and it holds some of the oldest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wood in Oregon. It’s farmed now by the Gross family of Cooper Mountain. Dr. Bob Gross, a physician by training, certified Cooper Mountain organic with Oregon Tilth in 1995 and biodynamic with Demeter in 1999, well before either meant anything commercially in Oregon. Barbara Gross grew up in those rows and runs the operation today. They began converting Chehalem Mountain to the same standard in 2022. Block B3 is the Kathryn Hermann Cuvée.
Mark and June Royer planted in the Eola-Amity Hills in 2016. Mark came to it from the other end of the business, wine banking and then the merchant trade, so he knew what he was signing up for before the first vine went in. They farm a small site, keep the yields deliberately low, and describe their own approach as inclusive habitat and minimal interference.
We pick on our own calendar and press the way we press. None of it matters if the farming is wrong.
Chardonnay
Pioneers of Black Chardonnay in Oregon.
The method is not new. It is how white Burgundy was made sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, before pneumatic presses and inert gas made it easy to keep juice clean and pale from the first minute. Whole clusters are foot-crushed, chilled and left overnight on their skins, then given a long, heavy press cycle with no sulfur. What comes out of the press is dark, cloudy and close to black.
That color is the point. Phenols pulled from skins and seeds take up oxygen in the must and then fall out of suspension, carrying the brown down with them, along with most of the bitterness they would otherwise have left in the wine. Oxygen spent now is oxygen the finished wine never has to spend in bottle. The must looks ruined. The wine is pale, and it keeps.
The juice goes to barrel with everything but the gross lees, ferments on native yeast, and the top wines sit eighteen months without stirring. A wine made this way cannot be corrected once it has started, which is why the fruit has to be clean and the picking date has to be right. It is the technique the house is known for.
Pinot Noir
Pinot Noir, sorted berry by berry.
Three sites, all of them on old seabed. Shea in Yamhill-Carlton, where Dick and Deirdre Shea are famously particular about who they’ll sell fruit to. Stardance, planted in 2003, on pea vine sediment a few ridges over. Chehalem Mountain, farmed biodynamically on the slope facing Ribbon Ridge. Three readings of sedimentary ground, which is not the same as three versions of one wine.
A quarter of production ferments in 500-liter clay amphorae brought over from Tuscany. Filling them is slow: berries are snipped off the cluster by hand and dropped in whole. Clay does not add anything the way new oak does. It holds the wine and gets out of the way.
Oak stays where it belongs. The Shea sees sixteen months in twenty percent new French barrels. Extraction stays gentle throughout.
What others have said
“Possibly the best wine from the region I have tasted.”
Audrey Frick, JebDunnuck.com, on the 2021 Richard Hermann Cuvée Pinot Noir (100 points)
In May 2026, Decanter named 00 Wines among Oregon’s defining old-vine producers, scoring the 2023 Chehalem Mountain Chardonnay 97 points and the Chehalem Mountain Pinot Noir 95. The same year, 00 Wines was named a Winery of the Year finalist in VinePair’s Next Wave Awards.
Featured wine
Richard Hermann Cuvée Chardonnay
Marine sedimentary soil on the cool side of the valley, named for Chris’s father, whose argument with his son about Oregon Chardonnay is the reason any of this exists.
No club, no tasting room.
There is no membership to join and nowhere to turn up for a flight. The lots are small, they are made by hand, and they are sold here until they are gone. Everyone on the mailing list gets the release at the same time.
That arrangement is not a marketing position. It is what lets the work stay this specific: no volume commitment to meet, no tasting-room traffic to satisfy, and no reason to make a wine that is easier to sell than it is to defend.
It also means the only thing arguing for these wines is the wines.
Oregon is where the questions get asked first.
Two soils, one valley, and a decade of work that the Burgundy and Champagne projects were built on top of.