Small farms, acres of open fields, some berries and vegetables. Livestock here and there. Fifty years ago, McMinnville, Dundee and Newberg were small, out-of-the-way towns that grew food crops, if anything. There weren't tasting rooms on every block. There weren't blue road signs notifying tourists which wineries were available ahead. Read full article
Today wine is made in all 50 States, but there are still only a handful of domestic wine regions so acclaimed and reliable the public knows them by name. Starting with Napa and Sonoma, it’s a pretty short list, and one of the top spots on it belongs to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Read full article
In the 1960s and '70s in Oregon, a billion-dollar industry was beginning on the backs of just a handful of families. Many of them had recently moved to the Willamette Valley from California. None of them was business-minded — they were artists and scholars, engineers and scientists, liberal-minded people united by a fondness for fine wine, a love that was not widely shared by the rest of the country. Read full article
In our corner of the Northwest, wine lovers have an abundance of riches. In our home state, Washington produces some of the best wines in the world and most of those wineries are right in our backyard. But it’s not just Washington that produces wines of distinction; our neighbors south in Oregon create wines that are just as worthy of our attention and their vineyards, estates, and tasting rooms are a few short hours south on I-5. Read full article
When it happened, Oregon's 2013 Pinot Noir vintage looked like a flop. A warm growing season climaxed with a couple of heat spikes in mid-September. And then it rained. And rained. And rained some more. Some vineyards counted 9 inches of rain in a week. Most of Willamette Valley got around 4 inches. “I never saw rain so sideways here, and it hit when everything was pretty damn ripe,” said Rollin Soles of Roco. Read full article
Admit it: Wine country isn’t just about the wine. It’s about the unfolding views, the earthy-sweet aromas, the ethereal blankets of fog, and the impression that you are a part of the landscape, rooted as firmly in the soil as the vines themselves. Read full article
It's a small community not unlike so many others in Oregon’s rural Willamette Valley. But this little town is the heart and soul of wine country. Named after a Scottish town, Dundee has long been agricultural. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early ’70s when such pioneers as David Lett, Dick Erath, Bill Blosser and Susan Sokol Blosser arrived and began planting pinot noir in the ancient red soils. Read full article
The terrain of Oregon's Willamette Valley is made up of bountiful complex micro-climates that play a major role in the dynamism and charisma of the region's variegated Pinot Noirs. These micro-climates offer diverse geology and soils, so the multiple sub AVAs of the larger Willamette Valley AVA have been inherent in identifying and outlining the unique characteristics of different wine growing areas. Read full article
