Trousse-Chemise

That gave her more time to help her parents and grandparents in the garden, where mango and banana trees bloomed above tropical flowers, and fresh-picked lychee fruits were just a matter of stretching your arm. It was there that Anne first discovered a love of botany and outdoor work—which was cemented during the summer of her fourteenth year, which she spent in the Côte de Nuits, carrying out veraison in the vineyards of Hubert and Francoise Lignier.

French adolescents rarely start working so young, and nothing had prepared her for the sheer physicality of squatting and shuffling from one low vine to the next, stripping leaves and clipping clusters, row after row. But the repetitive labor flipped an intellectual switch. “You were doing the same thing over and over, but tailoring it to each vine—because each vine was different, so you’d have to think about it. You wouldn’t just let your mind wander. You’d have to choose which cluster to keep, and I found that fascinating.”

Anne kept returning every summer—straight through university in Dijon, where she studied biology, physics, and mathematics. She then earned a master’s degree under the famed oenologist Denis Debourdieu in Bordeaux. But the Ligniers, owners of an 1880 estate who’d partnered with her dad on a vineyard in Morey-Saint-Denis, became lasting mentors: Francoise in the fields, Hubert in the cellar.

She lit out for Oregon in the mid-2000s, intent on perfecting her English in North America’s burgeoning center of Pinot Noir. An internship at Beaux Freres led to winemaker positions under Laurent Montalieu at Soléna Estate and Hyland Estates—and an insatiable hunger for understanding the lay of the land. Hitting the road with a binder full of vineyard maps, she methodically worked her way through the Willamette Valley. “My first year here, I just drove everywhere.” She walked the vine rows, tasted the wine, and found a community strikingly unlike the cloistered old families of Burgundy. People were new to wine, excited about making it, and open to fresh faces.

“That’s what attracted me the most—how everyone was still trying to figure it out,” she says. “I was fascinated by how willing people were to talk to each other, and share their failures—share what was not working for them—and also willing to listen to what was working for others. And all that without paying a consultant. We were just sharing as much information as we could to make better wine.”

With the clarity that sometimes comes easiest to foreign observers, Anne could make out two main camps: one that was “overmanaging their wines” in search of very extractive, ripe, higher-pH Pinot; and a polar opposite that shunned ripeness in favor of “really light colored, little funky wines.” In 2012 she launched a side hustle to pursue her own vision of wines that “taste like Oregon.” Charting a path between the stylistic extremes, Trousse-Chemise combines Anne’s lifelong attraction to Burgundian elegance with her intimate knowledge of the northern Willamette Valley’s most compelling vineyards—and the friendships she’s been making ever since those early road trips.

“Oregon is not Burgundy,” she notes. “We don’t have the same kind of acidity and tannin profile. But we’re still very close. And over time we’ve been able to understand our AVAs more—and there’s a clear distinction of style based on that … You can craft your wine very uniquely while respecting that AVA, and not just trying to emulate California or Burgundy.”

Blessed with the stylistic freedom that comes with her own label, Anne aims for delicate Pinots that are “a little more fruit-forward than just spicy” and reflect the state’s wide seasonal variations by capitalizing on how specific parts of each AVA respond best to each vintage’s conditions. “Lately I’ve been liking the Yamhill-Carlton fruit a lot—but from a very limited part of the AVA” that diverges from the area’s overall propensity for big, broad-shouldered tannins, she explains. “I want a decent amount of tannins, but for those tannins to be soft fairly early. And that’s been true in a few vineyards in the Yamhill-Carlton.” Meanwhile Dundee Hills can be a low-tannin source of light red fruit, while she turns to Eola-Amity Hills for acidity. Chehalem Mountain is her “go-to” for dark fruit and fresh raspberry aromatics.

“But it really depends on the vineyard,” she stresses. “I have some preferred AVAs, but within the AVAs some vineyards just behave very differently. Most of the vineyards I have, I’ve been working with for 15 years—and it took a while to get that understanding,” she says. “I like to really taste the different blocks all the time. And to visit the vineyard and see what the fruit looks like, especially later in the season. Some of our vineyards ripen in just two days once you start seeing some flavor coming. But others take so long, and you just need to be patient.”

It helps when you’ve been scrutinizing individual vines since you were 14. And that sensitivity guides her in cellar. So while choice blocks from Hyland and Zena Crown play to Anne’s preference for the high-toned purity of destemmed grapes, Shea Vineyard’s prized bunches reveal her deft hand with whole-cluster fermentation: “They’re the perfect shape, the stems are brown—so we know they’re ripe … I really just don’t want to disturb it. So let’s just be gentle and dump the whole cluster in the fermenter: it brings the spiciness but it’s always very well integrated.” Well-integrated is an apt description for Anne Sery.

Her Pinot blends channel Willamette’s diversity into supple, vibrant wines whose feathered textures gain depth with time in the glass. After 15 years in Oregon’s close-knit wine community, this Burgundian daughter stitches each vintage into a seamless expression of her adopted homeland.