g
Ke &
rk
o
C
GAVIN MCCOMAS
Eugene’s Cup Overfloweth
South Eugene’s Sundance Wine Cellars has the wine
and the staff to find the best stuff
BY HENRY HOUSTON
W
hen you enter Sundance Wine
Cellars, it’s akin to entering a
used bookstore: Instead of books,
wine bottles fill shelves and un-
opened boxes of wine wait on the
floor. And instead of stories from
authors around the world, wine
labels offer customers a taste of grapes from different
regions of the globe.
The deep sea of red and white at Sundance can be
intimidating if you don’t know what you want. But the
cellar has the knowledgeable staff to help you navigate
the store.
Store owner Gavin McComas says Sundance probably
has the most Oregon wine bottles in the world and has
the second-largest overall wine collection in the state.
Sundance has more than 500 Oregon pinot noirs and
more than 5,000 different wines.
“I don’t know if anyone else in the Northwest is dumb
enough to maintain that sort of inventory,” he laughs.
McComas adds that it’s indulgent to have such an
encyclopedic inventory because, like a bookstore, 10
percent of the store’s inventory makes up 90 percent of
the store’s sales.
Luckily, the store has manager Randy Stokes, who,
McComas says, “has the most amazing brain that can
remember 5,000 wines.”
Stokes has more than 30 years of experience and once
even picked grapes during harvest in France (which he
said was some of the hardest work he ever did, and he
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M
won’t do it again). He navigates through the forest of
wine labels with ease and is able to recommend wines to
fit a customer’s palate.
“If they seem like an adventurer, I kind of steer off a
little just to get them something different in their mouth,”
he says. “We can get in those ruts where we get the same
thing.”
So I ask Stokes, without saying the recommendation is
for me, what he’d suggest to someone who sticks mostly
with Willamette Valley pinot noirs. Right away, he says
going to France would be his first choice — then pointing to
Germany and England and maybe California (though with
a caveat that the Golden State isn’t the best for pinot noir).
Before COVID-19 hit the U.S., its presence in Italy
made the news, and Stokes says many customers came
in to buy Italian wines to show solidarity with the country.
Now, customers are buying Oregon wines (as they did
before the pandemic). The preference for local wines is
the reason why the store devotes so much floor space for
Oregon wineries.
Although Eugene has grocery stores like the Amazon-
owned Whole Foods and chains such as Market of Choice
and Fred Meyer, Stokes says Sundance works with smaller
distributors. This gives customers a chance to taste wines
from smaller wineries.
He says one distributor the store works with is a
Portland-based company that buys from small, family-
owned wineries in Italy and imports the wine to Oregon.
Smaller wineries develop their wine through more art and
craft and aren’t using a lab to meet market research, as
corporate wine companies do.
Stokes says he wishes people in the U.S. wouldn’t
think that you have to be pretentious when describing
wine. To Stokes, it’s just grape juice, and drinkers should
think about whether they like it and not try to talk like
a wine label.
And he says he wants to debunk the treatment of rosé
as a sweet wine.
“Rosés are highly underrated,” he says. “People still
have the conception that rosés are sweet. Those are people
who were drinking wine in the ’70s who haven’t understood
that the tradition wasn’t to make a sweet wine.”
He says that those sweet wines from California were
a waste product in the process of making other wines; it
was the runoff needed to get grapes ready for the real
wine. But it turns out the winemakers of the ’70s and ’80s
thought it tasted good.
“That’s how Americans got to know pink wine,” he says.
“I think when most people who walk up to this aisle and
see all this pink, they think it’s all sweet.”
Except for one bottle at the store, the rosés Sundance
carries aren’t sweet, he says. He wishes people would
explore rosé more often.
So I grabbed a bottle of rosé of pinot from Junction
City’s Brigadoon as a way for me to veer off my usual wine
path. I opened the bottle at home and found on the first
taste the tartness that turned me into an immediate fan.
Sundance Wine Cellars is located at 2441 Hilyard Street and offers
curbside delivery during the pandemic. Call 541-687-9463 for more
information.
M A Y
2 1 ,
2 0 2 0
13