The New Oregon Wine Festival

The first thing you smell walking into AAPI Food and Wine Fest isn’t the wine—it’s the grill. Charcoal-grilled beef tsukune, specifically, a Japanese skewer, tingly with Sichuan peppercorn and the toasty note of sesame. The suggested pairing is a 2023 pinot noir from Kristof Farms, co-owned by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof. The beef brings out the subtle, peppery nature of the pinot while accentuating its dark fruit.

Since 2023, AAPI Food and Wine Fest has brought some of Portland’s buzziest Asian American and Pacific Islander chefs to the Willamette Valley, laying out a spread of snacks and sweets to complement a handful of the region’s Asian American–owned or –helmed wineries. In 2025, Peter Cho, behind celebrated Korean restaurants Han Oak and Jeju, cooked in the festival’s VIP lounge. Vietnamese soup and street food stunner Annam VL served baby clams fragrant with lemongrass as a pairing for Evening Land chardonnay. Phaya Thai’s Nan Chaison scooped taro and sweet corn rice pudding into cups as a match for Landmass’s sparkling rosé of tempranillo. 

The festival’s food-and-drink duos are clearly copacetic—but you wouldn’t find them in a typical pairing class. Countless sommeliers have snubbed the vast and multifaceted world of Asian culinary traditions for years; wine pairings were for Western European cuisine. But for Lois Cho, a cofounder of AAPI Food and Wine Fest as well as Willamette Valley wine label Cho Wines, pairing East Asian flavors with wine made sense. Lois and her husband, Dave, moved to Oregon so Dave could study viticulture and work for Willamette Valley wineries like Stoller, which now hosts AAPI Food and Wine. But the couple shared a dream of opening their own wine label, and the foods they gravitated toward were always the guideposts for their wines, like their 2015 Cho Blanc de Noirs. “Our litmus test was, ‘Does this pair with sushi?’” Lois says. 

Over the last few years, winemakers and wine lovers in the Willamette Valley have been trying to open new access points to the region, wanting to make it feel more approachable to a broader audience. They’ve designed their tasting rooms to be family friendly, introducing extensive food menus or lawn games. They’ve hosted events pairing flights with candy bars. But one of the most exciting developments has been the growing, changing world of wine fests, borrowing the laid-back vibes of early-aughts brewfests while introducing many to the diversity of wine—and winemakers—in the Willamette Valley.

While wine was considered an egalitarian product for most of its history, somewhere along the way, its audience contracted to an ever-narrowing sliver of the population: the affluent and, more often than not, white. Despite Oregon’s status as a relatively poor state, our $8 billion–plus wine industry does seem to focus on the luxury market. The average bottle price of an Oregon wine is $56.40, while the average bottle of wine sold in the United States (from anywhere) is $15.66. That’s likely because the state relies on a delicate, temperamental grape that requires a lot of attention (a.k.a. labor). Pinot noir is expensive because it’s expensive to make. That’s even truer now, as a warming climate ripens grapes too quickly and seasonal wildfire smoke blows through vineyards like some menacing Hexxus, threatening to shrink yields and infect grapes with smoke taint.

For more than 30 years, Oregon’s most famous wine festival was the International Pinot Noir Celebration, a weekend-long bacchanal of tastings and tours culminating in a lavish dinner flush with red. Pinot growers from as far as France, New Zealand, Germany, and South Africa crossed oceans to get there. Legendary wine writers like Robert Parker and Eric Asimov would host talks; chefs like Michael Wolf, of the influential (and now closed) Bay Wolf in Oakland, California, would cook. And the buy-in reflected the roster. In 2024, a weekend pass cost $1,595. But in 2025, the IPNC didn’t host a festival at all, taking the year off to redesign the event. 

Back in 2018, it seemed like a different wine scene was starting to develop, one that was less stuffy. Vaporwave wine bars popped up left and right, and bottles of glou glou and skin-contact wines flooded restaurant lists nationwide. Wine was becoming fun, approachable, weird, cool. 

At the same time, while working at Northeast Portland wine bar and bottle shop 1856, Mallory Smith was noticing a pattern. The neighborhood regulars weren’t asking for Oregon wine; if someone did, they were usually from out of town, or they were hosting someone from out of town. 1856 only had about one row of Oregon wine—half pinot noir, half everything else. And when she gave people something that wasn’t pinot noir, they were floored. “It was surprising to me because I was in the wine bubble,” she remembers. “I knew people were growing things other than pinot noir and chardonnay, but I was surprised that people were surprised. There’s so much out there and no one was being exposed to it.”

So, in 2019, she and wine writer Martin Skegg founded the Alt Wine Fest. The “alt” meant everything but pinot noir. Winemakers from around the state would pour grüner veltliner and tempranillo and sémillon and cabernet franc, but nothing made with the grape growing on 70 percent of the Willamette Valley’s vines. Intentional or not, that “alt” signifier also applied to the experience of the festival itself. No seated dinners and formal flights in sight: Crowds of Big Bud Press–donning thirtysomethings lined up with stemless glasses at rows of tables, where dozens of winemakers poured fizzy pét-nat and raspberry red tempranillo rosé. People were tasting, sure, but they were also flinging bean bags into cornhole boards, ordering tacos from the truck parked outside, singing along to the music on the stereo. The fest has popped up in different spots over the years; this year, Smith and Skegg decided to  “remix” the event. On July 12, winemakers and drinkers will crowd into a mural-lined McMinnville alley to taste wines and eat tacos while a DJ spins vinyl. In other words, it’s cool. “I have people in the industry who say, ‘I love this event because it feels fun and not stuffy,’” Smith says. “You can be you, whether that’s the nerdy you who wants to learn about carbonic maceration, or you can go play Jenga.”

Wine hasn’t always been the main focus of fan-facing wine festivals. Aspen’s Food and Wine Classic and the Charleston Wine and Food Festival, for instance, are see-and-be-seen bashes more akin to Austin’s Hot Luck or the late, great Feast Portland, where Food Network chefs host demos and out-of-state tourists wait in line for a quick splash of something between snacks. But festivals like Alt and AAPI are really about the wine, and through it, give a much more accurate sense of the people making them. At all of these festivals, you’ll get face time with actual winemakers, and the opportunity to have a genuine conversation with them.

While festivals like AAPI and Alt Wine focus on wine drinkers, they’re also an attempt to connect with customers on a deeper level, from a new vantage as the entire industry struggles to connect with a younger audience. Alcohol consumption among adults under the age of 35 dropped 10 percent between 2003 and 2023, per a Gallup poll, and in 2024, Nielsen reported that 45 percent of Gen Z-ers over 21 surveyed (the oldest in Gen Z are 28) had never consumed an alcoholic drink. Wine is just one facet of the larger alcohol industry, but the small, local producers are feeling the effects of the cultural shift. “There’s so much happening, there’s so much nuance to it, but at a simplified level, people are drinking less,” Smith says. “So there’s a smaller slice of the pie to go after, and there are still just as many wineries, if not more.”

So even after the party ends, winemakers have to remain creative to stay afloat. More and more wineries have expanded their food programs, making their tasting rooms destination restaurants as much as they are places for flights. Some have transformed buildings on their property into vacation rentals, a way to keep folks nearby for tasting. But some are going for a mellower approach. When the Chos opened their tasting room in 2024, they knew they wanted the space to be family-friendly. They have play mats for little kids, games like Connect Four for older ones; while adults get glasses of sparkling wine and pinot, tykes get a snack and a juice box. “It’s not an ‘Oh, we’re allowing it,’ thing; it’s a ‘you’re welcome,’” Lois Cho says. “And then the guests stay longer because their kids are content.”

Three generations of Chos attended this year’s AAPI Food and Wine Fest. It’s far from the only event they throw in a year—after the festival, they jumped into preparing for a series of events in Seattle, a Filipino brunch with food cart Baon Kainan, and a meet-and-greet with local Asian American restaurateurs to teach them about wine service and pairings. Community building—both with winemakers and with the Willamette Valley at large—has been a huge part of the Chos’ approach as they try to connect with their audience. And the relationships they’ve formed have given them hope. “The state of the industry is really tough right now in a global sense. There are so many factors stacked against us,” Lois says. “But if there is anywhere people are poised to succeed, it’s the Willamette Valley.”