Winemaker Dave was back on Big Blend Radio recently, joining host Lisa Smith for a return conversation that started with wine and wandered, happily, into French horns, a beloved Papillon named Moxie, a future trip to Italy, and a fairly intense debate about zucchini. If you’ve got 48 minutes and enjoy hearing a winemaker be genuinely nerdy about more than just wine, it’s worth the listen. If you don’t, here’s the recap of “Getting to Know Winemaker Dave Specter of Bells Up Winery in Willamette Valley, Oregon.”
Two Careers, One Brain
The conversation opened with something Dave comes back to often: winemaking and music composition aren’t as different as they sound. Both start with raw materials — instruments in one case, grapes in the other — and both come down to a series of decisions aimed at making something that leaves people feeling good at the end of it.
Dave spent 20 years as a French horn player and, before Bells Up, worked as a tax attorney. It’s an unlikely combination on paper, but he’s found that the analytical and creative sides feed each other rather than compete.
From Dead Christmas Trees to a Working Vineyard
Lisa asked Dave to take listeners back to the beginning, and the honest version isn’t glamorous. When webought the 10-acre property at the end of 2012, it wasn’t a farm in any real sense. It was a hillside covered in dead Christmas trees and blackberry bramble. Getting it into plantable shape took what Dave calls “the three B’s of Oregon vineyard development: bulldozer, backhoe, and burn piles.” That took about a year before a single vine went in the ground.
The first vintage came in 2013, sourced from small growers who were personally involved in their own fruit rather than absentee landowners writing checks. The Bells Up tasting room opened its doors on Memorial Day weekend, 2015. Thirteen and a half years after that first walk through the blackberries, Bells Up is, as Dave put it, coming up on being a teenager (growing pains and all).
Dave backfills the holes used to locate our septic drain field.
Why “Bells Up”
Two things converge in the name. The literal one: the winery sits on Bell Road, a coincidence rather than a namesake.
The deeper meaning comes from the French horn itself. Most of the time, a horn player’s bell faces backward, away from the audience, with sound projecting behind them. But every so often, a composer writes a moment into the score marked “bells up.” This notation is the signal to lift the instrument, turn it toward the audience, and become, briefly, the center of attention.
It’s a small, dramatic flourish that has to be earned with polish, since the horn is unforgiving even under normal conditions. Dave built the whole identity of the winery around that idea: a small, quiet operation that occasionally gets its moment to shine, and wants its customers to feel like part of that moment rather than spectators to it.
It’s also, not coincidentally, why so many of the winery’s ideas — the name, the tastings, the way the whole place is run — are built around shared experience rather than putting the owner’s name on the label. As Dave explained it, plenty of wineries get named after the owner, the owner’s kid, or the owner’s dog. He wanted something people could connect to together.
The 2025 Harvest, and Why the Hillside Matters
Dave described the 2025 harvest as close to normal, itself a little unusual after several years of more dramatic swings. A mid-to-late September harvest, slightly earlier than typical, produced fruit he’s genuinely excited about: reds resting in barrel, whites already bottled, and everything tasting well.
That hillside location isn’t just scenic. Dave explained that the property’s slope is less about water and more about airflow. Specifically, protection it provides from late spring freezes. He pointed back to 2022, when a freeze followed an early April bud break. Because cold air sinks, it rolled down and off the Bells Up hillside; the only real damage in the valley that year showed up at the bottom of slopes and on flat ground, where the cold air had nowhere to go.
One Group at a Time — and Why
Bells Up has always done tastings one group at a time, and Dave connected that directly to how differently people experience wine. A conversation that works for a longtime collector doesn’t work the same way for someone tasting their first glass of Pinot Noir, and trying to serve both at once means shortchanging one or the other. Taking one group at a time lets the conversation actually meet people where they are.
As for what’s in the glass? Alongside the Pinot Noir the Willamette Valley is known for, Bells Up pours Pinot Blanc, a genetic mutation of Pinot Noir that Dave finds more complex and interesting than its better-known cousin, Pinot Gris.
Then there’s Seyval Blanc, a grape more commonly associated with the Great Lakes region and the Finger Lakes than the Willamette Valley, and one Bells Up is currently the only winery in the valley growing. We make it two ways — still (Helios) and sparkling (Joy) — and likes pouring them side by side so people can taste how differently the same grape can turn out depending on the process.
A Sneak Preview: Schioppettino
Perhaps the most surprising reveal of the episode came during the bucket-list question. Dave mentioned an obscure Italian grape growing on the Bells Up property: Schioppettino. Hailing from the far northeastern corner of Italy, the varietal was nearly wiped out during World War II before a handful of growers made it their mission to save it.
Bells Up recently bottled its first vintage, and Dave says the winery likely has the largest planting of it in Oregon, among only a handful in the entire country. It’ll be released under an easier to pronounce name (Via Appia). But for now, it’s a nice reminder that after 13-plus years, we still find new things to get excited about.
The Seven Questions
Every Big Blend interview wraps with a rapid-fire round, and Dave’s answers were worth the wait:
Moxie inspects our first-ever new French oak barrels back in 2013.
- Spirit animal: Moxie, a Papillon Dave and Sara adopted back in 2001 after Sara fell for the breed watching one win Best in Show at Westminster. Moxie was, by Dave’s account, the gentlest and most playful dog he’s known — and somehow ended up claimed as “his” dog despite being Sara’s idea. She passed in 2015, and her pictures are still all over the house.
- For fun: Hiking, the coast, Oregon’s arts and symphony scene, and (as a self-described sports nerd) keeping tabs on football and basketball teams from a few thousand miles away.
- A life lesson for the next generation: Don’t assume you’re locked into one path. Dave spent a decade as a tax lawyer before any of this, and he’s candid that plenty of those years felt like a grind. But the skills built there quietly show up in how he runs Bells Up today. He also shared a detail that says a lot about how people find small wineries now: over the past year and a half, at least 15 visitors have told him they found Bells Up by asking an AI chatbot for the best wineries in the Willamette Valley, and Bells Up keeps coming out on top.
- Bucket list: Italy. Dave’s less interested in Rome, more drawn to Florence and the surrounding hill country, chasing down obscure grape varieties nobody’s heard of. Which, naturally, is exactly the kind of thing that led to Schioppettino ending up on the property in the first place.
- Theme song: A Mozart horn concerto — specifically the second of Mozart’s four, a piece Dave calls a rite of passage for young horn players and one of the most fun pieces in the repertoire to perform.
- What he hopes isn’t served at dinner: Not much, honestly, except desserts drowning in sugar with no real flavor behind them. Dave’s one real indulgence is dark chocolate, ideally in the upper 60s to low 70s percent range.
- What the Big Blend Media House needs: A vegetable garden. Heirloom tomatoes specifically, no cherry tomatoes, and absolutely no zucchini, which Dave has apparently sworn off after one too many baseball-bat-sized surprises from a few days’ inattention.
Listen to the Full Episode
There’s a lot more in the full conversation, including a genuinely fun tangent about wine snobbery, the “three sips” approach Dave uses to introduce people to a new wine, and why he thinks the Blue Zones’ relationship with wine has more to teach Americans than most diet trends do. You can find the full episode, along with the rest of the Big Blend Media House, at Big Blend Radio.
Thanks to Lisa and the whole Big Blend team for having Dave back. If you’d like to ask him about tomatoes, tax law, or Seyval Blanc yourself, you know where to find him — reach out anytime, he really does answer.
