Larry Stone

Listening to the sommelier’s story

Larry Stone’s career connects restaurant wine service with vineyard development. The Court of Master Sommeliers records his Master Sommelier qualification in 1988. Its profile also traces his competition achievements and restaurant work, a useful starting point for understanding the experience he brought to Oregon.

A sommelier learns to connect a bottle with a place, a producer and a person at the table. In Stone’s Oregon story, that curiosity moves further upstream: from explaining the finished wine to choosing a site and helping create the wine itself.

A hillside worth committing to

Larry’s Oregon story begins with a conviction about place. His experience of wines from Seven Springs drew him to this pocket of the Eola-Amity Hills. When neighbouring land became available, he committed to establishing a vineyard there. Lingua Franca’s own account says he auctioned his personal wine collection to help fund the down payment: a collector turning bottles from the past into vines for the future.

The estate records his acquisition of the Janzen Farm at the end of 2012. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay were planted on the site, giving the project its foundation in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

When Lafon saw the possibility

Dominique Lafon brought the experience of his family’s celebrated Meursault estate in Burgundy and a long friendship with Larry. The connection became a shared enterprise: after Larry secured and planted the land, Lafon proposed that they make wine together.

Thomas Savre supplied another essential strand. Trained at the University of Burgundy, with experience at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Domaine Dujac, he had worked with Lafon at Oregon’s Evening Land. He joined Lingua Franca as its first employee in May 2015 and became its winemaker. The estate’s founding partners were Larry Stone, David Honig and Dominique Lafon; Savre’s role was to help realise their ambition in the vineyard and cellar.

What makes the collaboration compelling is its shared purpose: Burgundy experience brought to bear on an Oregon site, with attention to what that hillside could express. In his own account, Lafon describes learning to adapt his approach to Oregon. The vineyard helped shape the winemakers’ thinking as well as the wine.

Hear him in his own words

The embedded oral history was recorded by Linfield’s Oregon Wine History Archive in 2019. Stone discusses his path into wine, the move to Oregon, planting decisions and the ambition to bring people together through wine.

An oral history preserves a particular moment. Its description of Stone’s position in 2019 should not be mistaken for a verified statement of current ownership or executive responsibility. Listen for the decisions and motivations behind the project as well as the career milestones.

Follow the story into the bottle

Our Lingua Franca winery profile takes up the estate and its place. The Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wine guides provide another route: how the same grape becomes a different finished wine through source and cellar choices.

That connection between person, place and production is the point of this introduction. You do not need an examination vocabulary to follow it; a good question about a vineyard or a fermentation vessel is enough to begin.