The Best Wine Tasting in Oregon’s Willamette Valley

With more than 700 wineries and 11 distinct American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) nested within, the Willamette Valley can be a daunting place to taste. Things get more complicated when you factor in preferences. Some people hit Highway 99 for a glass of wine and a beautiful view; some seek world-class pinot noir with noteworthiness; some want to taste new-to-them varietals and geek out over soil types; some want to do something impulsive on a Saturday afternoon. So, to pull together this list, we hit up some friends: winemakers like Ovum’s Ksenija Kostic and John House, sommeliers like Brent Braun (OK Omens) and Ron Acierto (formerly Okta), and Portland Monthly restaurant critic and longtime wine writer Jordan Michelman. Then, we ventured into the valley ourselves, slurping and swirling and spitting until we poured out the list below. To the hills!

Preeminent Pinot

In many ways, pinot noir created the Willamette Valley as we know it. It’s a bit of a goldilocks grape: Delicate and fussy, it needs enough sun to ripen, but too much and it becomes Smucker’s saccharine. As the Willamette Valley continues to get hotter, the red-fruited, ruby-slipper Burgundian style that made this region famous is harder to pull off. Still, the valley is absolutely flooded with exceptional winemakers making subtle, sophisticated pinot noir. 

Throw a cork in the Willamette Valley and you’ll hit a winery making pinot noir, so we’re going to give you some options to start. For a taste of some trailblazing vines, begin at the Eyrie Vineyards’ McMinnville tasting room. David Lett planted some of the Willamette Valley’s first pinot noir (and pinot gris) back in the mid-1960s, on the slopes of the Dundee Hills. Today his son, Jason Lett, tends the regeneratively farmed vines. Reserve a spot at the old-school tasting room to encounter pinots from those original plantings and, if you’re lucky, a few bonus pours from the cellar. 

For pinot from the winery making Portland sommeliers swoon, check out Abbott Claim in Carlton, the domain of winemaker Alban Debeaulieu (“the best winemaker in the country that people don’t know about,” in the words of OK Omens sommelier Brent Braun). Critics reliably score Abbott Claim’s pinots in the 90s, and Decanter named the winery’s 2021 Due North pinot the best US-made wine of 2024. A tour of the hillside vineyard, glass in hand, ends with a lineup of wild and enigmatic pinots in the subterranean wine library—not to mention some caviar for sustenance.

In Newberg, family-owned winery Et Fille celebrates Burgundian pinot noir, the style owner and winemaker Jessica Mozeico grew up making with her father, Howard. Jessica carries on the legacy today, with a shrewd eye for exceptional vineyards producing high-acid, cool-weather grapes, like Eola-Amity’s Palmer Creek and Yamhill-Carlton’s Fairsing Vineyard. Staff at Et Fille beautifully blend talk of soil types and farming and winemaking techniques with family lore and vineyard tales. You’ll also leave with a few fun images: Recently, a tasting steward described the winery’s gamay as having “a transatlantic accent.”

High on the hills of the Ribbon Ridge AVA is Ridgecrest, another father-daughter winemaking project. Harry and Wynne Peterson-Nedry personally host each tasting in a quaint vineyard cottage. Harry cracks dad jokes and Wynne talks malolactic fermentation and whole cluster percentage. Ridgecrest saves half of its harvest for reserves, which the family releases years later under its RR label. Thus, a standard tasting includes pinot noirs from as far back as 2011. Harry recalls the weather of each vintage, and Wynne translates the effects—the mushroomy notes of 2013’s rainy harvest, the jammy blast of heat in 2015. They even have vintage-based charts organized by yield and temperature, so you can triangulate your next favorite vintage based on past loves. —Brooke Jackson-Glidden

Rooms with a View

It’s hard to find a winery in the valley that doesn’t have incredible sights, especially during the fall harvest, when fields shine with crimsons, ochres, and ambers. But a few stand out, for the views and the wine.

Soter Vineyards’ Mineral Spring Ranch is the ideal launch of a sightseeing tour. Perched atop a hill outside Carlton, the spacious tasting room was once the Soter family home, and patriarch Tony Soter still lives on the property. The patio is the best seat in the house, with a wide panorama of the surrounding hilly countryside and farmlands, the distant mountains a pale blue. Soter’s still wines are uniformly excellent, but its crisp sparkling wines are the real gems. It’s hard to beat the rosé brut paired with lunch grown on the farm you’re gazing out at. Say hi to the fluffy Highland cows on your way out.

Alexana Winery is a quick jaunt east. The winery offers a unique vantage, looking southwest from its impressive patio on the “backside” of the Dundee Hills. A century-old Douglas fir dominates the foreground with a watering hole where Cooney pigs gather. Beyond it, the stunning Cascade Range. Alexana’s stellar wines are estate-grown, and visitors can sample single-vineyard bottles, exploring the way volcanic soils bring red fruit and savory notes, while marine soils lead to darker fruit notes and rich spices.

Half an hour northeast, into the Chehalem Mountains, is Ponzi Vineyards. Take SW Mountain Home Road and you’ll find the luxe tasting room of the third-oldest winery in the valley. Broad windows provide an unobstructed view of the surroundings, but the wraparound deck is the move. As you sip Ponzi’s layered, elegant pinots and minerally chardonnays, you can gaze Mounts Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams to the north, while the western view is dotted with farms and other wineries. —Alex Frane 

Off the Beaten Track

Not every winemaker in the Willamette Valley has a standard tasting room—in fact, many of the region’s best don’t. Instead, serious wine nerds reserve private, one-on-one tastings for a splash of some of the area’s most elusive wines. Kick things off with a house call: Mo Ayoub of Ayoub Wines will greet you at the door of his Dundee home, taking you to his back porch to marvel at the vines in his backyard. They supply the grapes for his austere pinot noir, unafraid to show off the grape’s dark fantasy side. His Memoirs series, something of a reserve blend, best illustrates his meticulous approach to winemaking, elegant bottles that will only benefit from a few years in a wine fridge. Linger for a taste of his cabernet franc—some of the only grown in the Willamette Valley.

A 10-minute drive away, past a menagerie of geese, ducks, goats, and koi, is Native Flora, where Scott Flora greets you at his front door. A self-identifying contrarian, Flora planted his Dundee Hills vineyard on a north facing slope, anticipating rising temperatures—now, as his neighbors grapple with hotter vintages, his fruit ripens the way others did in the twentieth century. The result is an astounding range of varieties displayed in his typical tasting flight (which he also attributes to his “amazingly complicated” vineyard site, with seven different soil types and 400-foot elevation range). You’ll taste pinot noir here, but in a rosé reminiscent of sour candy, blended with pinot blanc and some of the only malbec grown in the valley. Or maybe it’ll be made, intentionally, with smoke taint, playing off the typical tobacco of the grape with a subtle, peaty note. Or maybe he’ll pour you some pinot Gouges, a mutation that almost resembles vinho verde and tastes like a slice of key lime pie.

If you’re headed back to Portland, stop by Kelley Fox Wines in Gaston. Fox, who studied biochemistry before working with pinot pioneers like David Lett, now makes her own distinctive pinot noir, often sourcing from some of the oldest vines in the valley. That includes blocks of pinot from coveted vineyards like Freedom Hill and Maresh, but also basically unheard-of plots of albariño from Mount Angel. Because, while Fox flexes as a pinot noir winemaker, she’s also the queen of curveballs: Think acid-happy white wines made with German and Austrian varietals; her Portland popular skin-contact blend Nerthus, with its psychedelic earth mother label; and one hell of a vermouth to whip out at a dinner party. —BJG 

No Reservations Required

Tasting in the valley can be as simple as hopping in the car and driving to Newberg, though you’re likely to run up against strict reservation policies at most. Still, if you know where to go, it’s possible to roll in unannounced, quaff some killer vino, and be on your way.

If flying without reservations, start just outside Dundee at Day Wines, where Brianne Day represents the area’s winemaking vanguard. Her bright pink “Lemonade” rosé, punchy summer reds, and funky pet-nats break from tradition with irreverence, none more than her orange wine hero Tears of Vulcan. Day Camp, the winery’s casually cool tasting room, makes an apt spot to sip endlessly creative blends.

Minutes south is Stoller Family Estate’s airy and modern tasting room, enclosed by the vineyards and fields. Stoller is one of the region’s biggest names, with broad international distribution, and its tasting room acts more like a cool wine bar than a classically structured tasting. Still, your server will be happy to chat with you about the estate-grown wines, whether it’s their top-selling rosé or wines made with single clonal varieties, allowing you to taste the difference between Pommard and 777.

Abbey Road Farm, a working farm and winery with a picturesque farmhouse tasting room, is another 15 minutes north, past Lafayette. Alongside familiar varietals, it specializes in rarer grapes like trousseau gris (peppery, tropical, and tingly with citrus) and trousseau noir (inky, juicy, and dry but packed with fruit). Flights end at 4pm, but it’s worth finishing your day here with a few glasses and snacks from chef Will Preisch, which range from caviar to chicken liver mousse to the sleeper hit: Chex mix with spiced nuts. Sated, wine in hand, wander until you find the goats, pigs, cows, chickens, geese, and Kevin the peacock. If you’re lucky, farm cat Wheezy might give you a tour. —AF 

Your Favorite Winemaker’s Favorite Wine Region

Wherever you taste in the Willamette Valley, from the Laurelwood District to Eugene, you’ll likely encounter wines from Eola-Amity Hills. And yet, very few tasters think to book reservations inside the AVA, which includes part of Salem and the tiny farming town of Amity. That’s a mistake, especially now: While many Willamette Valley regions can no longer produce the light-profile pinots of cooler vintages, this one benefits from the far-reaching oceanic breeze of the Van Duzer corridor wind current, namesake of the adjacent AVA, which provides a chill that slows ripening.

Evening Land Vineyards is a worthy introduction to the neighborhood, a heavily forested property with a 20-foot waterfall and a homey collection of tasting cabins. The estate’s Seven Springs Vineyard is known for its exceptional chardonnay and pinot noir, kept cool by the estate woodland and windy butte-side vineyards. You’ll taste plenty of both, as well as gamay, a zippy pinot noir blanc, and maybe even a few older vintages to compare. Tasting in front of the waterfall is the real draw—at a picnic table paisley with lichen and moss—though you’ll need to join the wine club to get there.

Maggie Harrison, of Amity’s Antica Terra, has received mountains of international praise. Her wines can be extraordinarily hard to find and cost hundreds per bottle. Harrison’s fame—or notoriety, depending who you ask—has to do with her sensory approach to winemaking: She tastes the juice with as little context as possible, blending solely on flavor and nose. Her elixirs run morel-earthy pinot to a 100-percent-chardonnay ice wine. Stop by for lunch, and those witchy wines will arrive alongside a tasting menu from James Beard Award–winning chef Timothy Wastell.

Finish with an up-and-comer recommended by former Okta sommelier Ron Acierto: Arabilis, from husband-and-wife team Kenny and Allison McMahon. While many compare the region to Burgundy, the McMahons are more into Champagne. Traditional method sparkling wines stun here, but so do the oak-aged chardonnays, which taste like gorging yourself in a seaside fruit orchard. —BJG

Next Gen

The catchall “natural wine” calls forth edgy branding and cloudy orange wines resembling kombucha. But with catchalls we lose the nuances. So forget the labels: What these winemakers share is a desire to acknowledge the impacts of climate change on the industry, and make some attempt to recover or rehabilitate the land. The resulting wine captures what’s happening in those vineyards by adding as little stuff as possible along the way.

For an iconoclastic set of winemakers, it’s only fitting to start with lunch at an iconoclastic tasting room. No Clos Radio, the Forest Grove home base of buzzy labels like Maloof, Fossil & Fawn, and Monument, doesn’t operate as a traditional tasting room; instead, it behaves like a casual wine country café, with pink fuzzy chairs inside and outdoor tables straight out of granny’s garden. Maloof cofounder Ross Maloof isn’t pouring wine inside; instead, he’s searing coulotte and dousing it in anchovy Bordelaise, or slicing pâté en croûte with brandied cherries. His wines—as well as his roommates’—are available as glass pours, unless they appear as complements to the evening tasting menu.

Limited Addition Wines, marked with a spray-painted sign in a far-flung corner of Gaston, is a collaboration between Master of Wine Bree Stock and seasoned enologist (and husband) Chad Stock dedicated to honoring and reinvigorating the region’s biodiversity. Tastings are a leisurely two hours and heavily informed by wine education. You’ll taste things you’ve never heard of, or varieties you didn’t think could grow here: inky and complex cabernet dorsa, floral and melancholy blaufränkisch, nutty and ripe arneis. It’s easy to absorb the Stocks’s radical optimism, looking beyond pinot and chard to create a new and more resilient Willamette Valley.

You may stumble across a few amphora-aged wines at Limited Addition. The Stocks—and many others in the US using the ceramic winemaking vessels—get their amphora from potter-winemaker Andrew Beckham. Beckham Estate Vineyard, which he and wife Annedria run, ages all of its wine in amphora fired on-site, which give the final product a silky body and unexpected flavor profile contrasted with classically barrel-aged pinot. Cross your fingers for a pour of Aequalis, a spa day of pinots noir and gris blended with eucalyptus freshness, and splurge for the tour of the amphora studio.

The arresting landscape at Johan Vineyards is alone worth the visit: You’ll follow a winding gravel road through oak savanna and foggy forest on the way in. The Van Duzer Corridor AVA’s Pacific gusts keep the vines incredibly chilly here, which means the vineyard can support grape varieties common in Alpine countries—tastings typically include varieties like savagnin, Zweigelt, Kerner, and even a Jura-style dessert wine. Side-by-side pours point out intersections and variances between the winery’s central and southern European varietals, all grown a few steps from your glass. —BJG