A matter of taste.

Byline: Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

SCOTTSBURG - Many people think Cole Danehower has the best job in the world. As publisher of the Oregon Wine Report, he tastes, describes and writes about wines and the people who make them.

"I have not met a single person in the Oregon wine industry that I wouldn't want to have over for dinner, sit down and just have a good time with," says Danehower, whose quarterly publication recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for newsletter writing on food, beverage and nutrition.

But the job does have a drawback.

"The worst part of it is, it's hard," he says. "It's very difficult to taste through all these wines that I have to review, to focus on them intently, to write about them accurately and to essentially not repeat myself, and to be as thorough as I can be. It is hard work!"

When we stopped by Cole and Andrea Danehower's riverfront home in Scottsburg recently, more than 50 bottles of white wine stood in the kitchen awaiting tasting. Each was placed in a brown paper bag by Danehower's wife to hide the label from her husband.

The bags were marked with initials indicating the wine variety: PG for pinot gris, C for chardonnay, PB for pinot blanc, R for riesling and O for other - all of them dry white wines, the theme for the next issue of his newsletter. And more bottles sat awaiting bagging in the former root cellar that now serves as the Danehowers' wine cellar.

Danehower (pronounced DAN-eh-ower) says he's capable of tasting, spitting out without drinking, and describing up to two dozen wines a day when necessary.

"I try to do them in flights of 10 or 12," he says. "So I'll taste 10 or 12 in the morning and then I've got to rest ... I'll try to do another 10 or 12 in the afternoon. So two dozen a day is about all I can possibly manage."

Danehower will occasionally consume the remains of a bottle of particularly excellent wine with dinner and he uses some leftover wine to make vinegars in the glass jars and wooden kegs that sit on his kitchen counter. He indicated with a gesture, however, that most of the wine gets poured down the drain.

Danehower began his newsletter in 1999 and has developed an annual schedule with Oregon sparkling wines and sweet wines as the topic for the first issue, dry white wines as the second, followed by non-pinot-noir red wines as the third.

"The fourth issue of the year is always the vintage roundup for pinot noir," Danehower says. "That's the primary grape in this state, the most important wine we produce. It's what we're best known for. So that issue is always, in particular, well looked forward to by the folks who love Oregon wines."

Each issue contains at least one profile of a winemaker, an article analyzing or reporting on an issue of concern to the consumers of Oregon wines, and an OWReport Card on individual wines of the type being featured in that issue.

The wine reviews are listed randomly, not alphabetized by winery name. Danehower had so many reviews in his last pinot noir issue that he could fit only 69 of them into the newsletter and had to post the remaining 52 reviews - including three of the top 10 wines - on his Web site (www.oregonwinereport.com).

In his OWReport Card, Danehower gives a detailed summary of the flavors and aromas he experienced while tasting each wine and he provides background comment on the wine and the winery that produced it.

Also, somewhat reluctantly, he awards each wine a letter grade much like a school report card. He refuses to use the 100-point rating scale attributed to wine writer Robert Parker that's commonly used today by other wine publications.

"I have a fundamental problem with the numerical grading system ... I don't essentially believe that people can distinguish between, let's say, an 89 and a 90 on a 100-point scale," Danehower says. "I just think that the gradations are way too fine and the whole process is way too subjective for a grading system of that granularity to make much sense."

Danehower says he launched the Oregon Wine Report without scores of any kind because he believes the qualitative description of a wine's character and flavor are more important than a quantitative ranking.

`However, what I discovered was my readers - and I think they probably reflect the vast majority of wine consumers - are so comfortable with a rating system of some kind that they kept wanting to know, `Well, OK, is this wine better than that wine?' '

Danehower said his compromise was to select the letter grading system.

"I'm still not 100 percent comfortable with doing that, but people do, frankly, want some level of categorization like that," he says.

Danehower gave A-minus grades to Adelsheim Vineyard's 2001 Ribbon Springs Vineyard pinot noir and Adelsheim's 2001 Calkins Lane Vineyard pinot noir in last year's pinot noir edition. Another pinot noir from Adelsheim got a B-plus.

Since turnabout is fair play, David Adelsheim, president of Adelsheim Vineyard and chairman of the Oregon Wine Board marketing organization, was asked to grade Danehower's publication in the same way Danehower grades Oregon wines.

"Well, I'm as opposed to grades on publications as I am grades on wine and think that it oversimplifies a complex question," Adelsheim says.

Adelsheim says that Danehower has done what nobody else has done by creating a publication "that is focused on Oregon but, more importantly, looks at wines from a broad perspective rather than from a narrow perspective of what does he like best.

"In fact," Adelsheim says, "the best parts of the Oregon Wine Report are the parts that are not the grades of the wine but what he says about them, how he shows how they can be used, makes suggestions for recipes and, most important of all, writes good stories on broad issues confronting the industry."

But when pushed to give Danehower's publication a letter grade, Adelsheim relents and says, "For me, for my taste, for what I like to read, I would give him an A-minus, much the same compliment that he would give to our wines. But I would not want that letter to stand for what I think somebody else might like in a wine writer.

"I enjoy reading what he has to say. I learn things each time I read from him. And I get clear communication about issues that he's concerned about by reading him. All of those are pluses to me and things that I don't often see in other publications.

"And on top of that, it's a subject that's near and dear to my heart, i.e., Oregon wines.

"But it may be that for somebody who cares only about knowing what the score on Napa Valley cabernets is, he should rate a D, because he never covers it."

Danehower, 49, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as a marketing executive for Silicon Valley companies before moving to Scottsburg. His parents had died within six months of each other and he purchased the house in Scottsburg from their estate. (The Danehowers plan to relocate to Portland because Andrea now works as an Internet sales consultant for Townnews.com, a job that requires her to travel by air every other week.)

Danehower had been a consumer and student of wine during much of his life, so one of the first things he did upon moving to Oregon was to start exploring the wine regions here.

"The nearest wineries, at the time, to Scottsburg were found in the Roseburg area," he says. "I had met the woman who is now my wife and on our first date, we went and tasted wine. It was early in my stay here in Scottsburg, and I realized that there was a lot more to the Oregon wine scene than I had known before."

To broaden his knowledge, he enrolled in a course on winemaking and the wine world through the extension program at the University of California at Davis.

"What made me feel confident that I could write about wine, and Oregon wine in particular? Well, I knew how to write. I've been doing that all my career. And I knew how to taste wine and how to describe what I taste," he says.

"I don't pretend to be a super palate like some other wine critics are, I think, probably Robert Parker is. What I try to do is to combine sort of my tasting history and experience with my communications abilities, and convey to people what it is I taste in the wine.

"And if they go out and buy a wine based on my review and they find that they like it in the same way I did, great! Wonderful! Then they can use me as a positive guide for selecting wines.

`If, on the other hand, someone goes out on the basis of my review and buys a wine and says, `Oh, I don't like this! What does this guy see in it?' That is also really valuable information,' he says. `It means they can use me as a negative guide ... `If this guy likes that wine, I'm not going to buy it. If he doesn't like this wine, I might.' That's perfectly fair.'

OREGON WINE REPORT

What: An award-winning, 32-page newsletter written and published by Cole Danehower of Scottsburg

Circulation: About 600 subscribers

Cost: $38 for four issues

Address: Oregon Wine Report, 1900 Scottsburg West Road, Scottsburg, OR 97473

Web site: www.oregonwinereport.com

CAPTION(S):

Cole Danehower examines a glass of wine at his home near Scottsburg. He has turned his love of wine into a successful publication, the Oregon Wine Report. Cole Danehower uses a whimsical bottle opener for his tasting chores. He uses brown paper bags to conceal the identity of wines until his taste tests are done.