Patricia Green, the low-key winemaker and co-founder of the winery that bears her name, was found dead, apparently of a fall, inside her rural cabin retreat near Roseburg, Oregon, on November 6. She was 62.
In a statement on the winery’s website, Jim Anderson, Green’s business partner, said her “approach to winemaking was pure. She had no motivations to be famous or acknowledged or even particularly that well paid. She had a belief in what parts of the earth could bear and what she could do to guide that fruit along a path of turning from one pristine to state to another.”
Green was born in Chicago and moved around before settling in Oregon. Her first wine-related job was in 1986 and it was picking grapes at Hillcrest Winery in southern Oregon, and in 1987 they hired her to be a winemaker. Green became the first winemaker for Torii Mor in 1993, where she met Anderson.
Anderson said that in 2000, he and Green “sort of stumbled into the property” of the former Autumn Winds Winery, bought it, and launched Patricia Green Cellars. The 52-acre estate is located in the Ribbon Ridge region of the Willamette Valley and known for its vineyard-designated Pinot Noirs.
“The vineyard meant pretty much everything to her,” Anderson told Wine Enthusiast. Green had taken on more of the agricultural and vineyard work in recent years because “that was who she was.
“Patricia Green Cellars exists because of her lifetime of doing what appealed to her and that happened to culminate into vineyard management and winemaking,” he said.
Published: November 8, 2017
