Horsepower plants its vines close enough together that no tractor will fit down a row. Draft horses do the cultivating instead, and the order in which that decision was made matters: the spacing came first and the animals followed. Rows sit three feet apart in both directions, which works out near 4,840 vines to the acre and ranks among the densest planting anywhere in North America.
Ground is what makes the gamble sane. The estate sits in the Rocks District of Milton-Freewater, an Oregon appellation approved in 2015 and the only one in the country whose boundaries were drawn around a single soil series. Its floor is dark basalt cobble dumped there by the Walla Walla River, drained well enough that roots go down instead of sideways, and reflective enough that the stones carry on ripening fruit after the sun has moved off the vines.
Walla Walla Valley
Christophe Baron brought the method over from the Marne, where his family farmed with horses into the middle of the last century. Sur Echalas, the first block, is planted one vine to a stake in the old Rhône fashion the name describes. Its Syrah reads savoury rather than ripe, with pepper the loudest note and olive and mineral behind it, at 13.8% alcohol in a corner of the world that could easily push higher.
Five wines carry the label, all red, all off blocks of a couple of acres. That is the point of the exercise and also its ceiling. Work this slow does not scale, it only repeats, so each new block has to be worth a pair of horses before a vine goes into it. Anyone can buy cobblestones. Almost nobody will farm them this way.
