Beaux Frères

Chardonnay with room to move

Chardonnay gives Damien Lapuyade room to work; as Head Winemaker at Beaux Frères in Newberg, he treats the grape as a material that changes with the hand. He arrived at the estate in 2023, bringing a path built through technical study at UC Davis and cellar work in the Willamette Valley. Before this post, he worked as cellarmaster at Iris Vineyards, then in cellar work and a winemaking role at Carlton Winemakers Studio. By 2020, he was winemaker at Evening Land Vineyards in the north Willamette Valley, sharpening his attention to a region where small shifts in site and handling show quickly in the glass.

At Beaux Frères, that experience meets a family-owned estate on Ribbon Ridge, a place known for Pinot Noir and now moving Chardonnay closer to the center of its program. Lapuyade has spoken about the grape in practical terms: “Chardonnay is a really compelling varietal because it's so malleable.” The sentence matters because it is not a slogan. It is a working premise. The grape can take pressure, oak, reduction, lees, restraint, or cut, and the winemaker has to decide which gesture belongs to the site.

An estate-driven white program

The house farms biodynamically on an 88-acre estate in the Ribbon Ridge AVA, with steep hillside vineyards around a rustic winery barn. Pinot Noir remains the red thread of Beaux Frères, but Lapuyade’s current mark is tied to Chardonnay, especially the 2023 Beaux Freres Chardonnay and his debut Willamette Valley Chardonnay in 2025. He has called this “a estate-driven Chardonnay program,” a small grammatical stumble in a useful phrase: the attention is on estate, not expansion.

That matters at a winery whose scale stays small and whose identity comes from the ground underfoot. The production language here is not about speed. It is biodynamic, organic, sustainable farming, still red wine as the historic focus, and Chardonnay handled as a responsive varietal rather than a side note. Lapuyade’s background suits that kind of pacing. Cellarmaster work teaches repetition. A studio setting teaches adaptation. A vineyard post asks for conviction, because the same fruit does not give the same answer each season.

The barn below the hillside

The cellar sits within a farm-like setting, quiet enough for the work to stay audible: the movement between tank and barrel, the tasting glass at the bench, the short conversation that follows a sample. Around it, the estate climbs in steep vineyard rows, holding Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in a landscape that does not feel designed for display. The room reads as intimate rather than polished, with rustic charm doing less as decoration than as context for the work.

Beaux Frères has a winemaker with time in the Willamette Valley, a biodynamic hillside, and a white program. If the next chapter has a name, it is already in bottle: 2023 Beaux Freres Chardonnay.