Oregon's Not-to-miss Willamette Valley Wine Scene

The most popular spot in McMinnville (population 34,000), in the heart of Oregon wine country, is a renovated shoe grease factory that’s now called Mac Market. The food hall has several restaurants, a bakery and a gourmet grocer.

It’s here that I meet Remy Drabkin, the 42-year-old mayor, for pizza and to chat about how she got into politics. Drabkin isn’t your typical mayor of a small agricultural town. First, she’s queer. Second, she’s been a winemaker since 2006, known for her Italian-style reds that include an estate lagrein (a red grape native to the valleys of South Tyrol). At her 30-acre property and farmhouse tasting room in the Dundee Hills, she’s planted 7 acres; she also sources fruit from other vineyards.
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When she was growing up here, in the mid-’90s, Oregon wine pioneers such as the Letts and the Ponzis—all Drabkin’s family friends—knew what the rest of the world is waking up to now: Oregon’s Willamette Valley yields grapes that make some of the finest wines on the market. There are three main types of soil here—volcanic, marine sediment and loess silt—and each lends different characteristics to the resulting wine.

In the past decade, the number of wineries in the valley has grown from fewer than 400 to more than 1,100—all peppering a 150-mile swath running south from Portland to Eugene. The area includes small towns like McMinnville and Dundee as well as hamlets such as Carlton. In between is rural farmland: fields with cattle, rolling hills and hilltop wineries with views of snow-covered Mount Hood.
The bustling scene inside Mac Market.Photographer: Ilana Freddye

This growth has spurred innovation in the Willamette Valley’s restaurant scene and a new generation of ultraluxury lodging options. A newly diverse crop of winemakers has transformed the region as well, not only with their fresh thinking but also by drawing a younger and less homogeneous wine audience to the region.

“I’m aware that just by showing up I challenge the status quo,” says André Hueston Mack, a Black sommelier and now winemaker at Maison Noir, who, like many of the newer faces of Oregon wine, doesn’t own land. He’s forged connections with vineyard owners and buys fruit from them—and cheekily calls one of his wines OPP, for Other People’s Pinot.

When Mack ran the beverage program at Per Se in New York City, he developed an obsession with Oregon. “Domestically, I felt Willamette Valley winemakers were doing the best pinot,” he says. When he decided to make his own wine, he bought a house in Dundee, 10 miles from McMinnville, and began buying grapes from Seven Springs Farm & Vineyard nearby.

Lizzy Esqueda and Brianne Day also source grapes from up and down the Willamette Valley. Esqueda began her career working for Tom Colicchio in New York and then at the Brooklyn Winery, but she fell in love with the Oregon wine community when she came out to work during the harvest at Stoller Family Estate.

“It wasn’t pretentious at all,” Esqueda says. In Manhattan she met some sommeliers who were full of themselves. “I wanted to be like, ‘It’s just grape juice!’” She makes her own grape juice out of a scrappy cooperative studio in the Eola-Amity Hills. Under her Mijita label, which roughly translates to “my little daughter” in Spanish, she makes a skin-contact pinot gris and a fruit-forward gamay that you can buy and sample at the grocer in Mac Market.
The net-zero tasting room at Stoller Family Estate.Photographer: Mike Haverkate

Day, meanwhile, founded Day Wines in 2012, with a focus on playful, approachable wines. “Climate change is very much on my mind,” she says. It’s one of the reasons she’s experimenting with hotter-climate Italian varietals like malvasia and zibibbo, which can withstand heat. In 2020, after forest fires damaged much of the fruit in the valley, she made a rosé called Lemonade (as in “when life gives you lemons …”). At her lively tasting room in Dundee, you can taste these as well as her Tears of Vulcan, a skin-contact white with a beguiling mix of viognier, pinot gris and muscat—and a cult following.

For my third tasting of the day, my husband drives us northeast on Route 99 to Et Fille, a winery that Jessica Mozeico founded with her father, Howard, in 2003. (The name means “and daughter” in French.) We try her six wines on the patio of her home, which looks out on a 3.5-acre vineyard.

“I’m fully aware that my grandparents would’ve been prohibited from owning land,” says Mozeico, who’s Japanese-Jewish. (States passed “alien land laws” throughout the 20th century that forbade certain immigrants from purchasing property.) We try her spicy gamay and three beautiful pinot noirs, the third of which, Gabriella, is named after her 8-year-old daughter. It’s a 21st birthday wine, meant to be enjoyed in 13 years. Come fall, her Newberg tasting room will have a similar homey feel.
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One beautiful summer day, I catch up with Oregon’s first Korean-American winemaking team, David and Lois Cho of Cho Wines. Under the shade of towering white oaks on their new 77-acre property in the Chehalem Mountains, we sit on a rustic deck next to a canvas tent (both serve as makeshift tasting rooms) and taste David’s wines, which include both a quaffable pinot noir rosé and a naturally bubbly pét-nat.

Lois, who organized the valley’s inaugural AAPI Food & Wine Fest in May, also runs Cho Wines’ TikTok and Instagram accounts and designs the labels. She says they’re building a new tasting room, but so many guests have told them they love the Oregon chic of the temporary “tasting tent,” they may reserve it as a member’s lounge.
Willamette Sparky from Shiba Wichern Cellars.Source: The Community Tap

Up a windy, unpaved road in Willamina, 18 miles southwest of McMinnville, Akiko Shiba and her husband, Chris Wichern, run informal tastings that are free as long as you buy a bottle or two from their Shiba Wichern Cellars label.

Shiba, who’s from Tokyo, began her career as a brewer in Germany. While there, a friend had her taste a riesling from a Rheinhessen winery; Shiba was so transfixed that she immediately enrolled in a four-year winemaking program. Together, Shiba and I try her Willamette Sparky, a sparkling white, as well as an aromatic Auxerrois and a few exquisite single-vineyard pinots.

The Willamette Valley offers lots of elaborate vineyard tastings, but the fact that you can still have experiences like the one at Shiba Wichern Cellars—charmingly rustic, with individual attention from the winemakers—is reason enough to go.

Local celebrities seem to understand this ethos, too. Former basketball star Channing Frye, who started Chosen Family Wines in 2020 with his friend and fellow NBA player Kevin Love, will start hosting private tastings this fall for as many as 10 people at his home on the banks of the Willamette River. Chosen Family’s higher-end wines are a creative collaboration with some of Frye’s favorite West Coast wineries like Lingua Franca and Hazelfern. They also work with Jackson Holstein at Granville Wines to make less-expensive bottles.

On my last day, I find myself back at Mac Market, this time for coffee with Diana Riggs, co-owner of the development. Over lattes and spanakopita, she tells me this building was so dilapidated when she and her husband first saw it in 2017 that it was raining inside.

A sense of community is what Riggs says has been the key ingredient to Mac Market’s success. In addition to being a vibrant food hall, the market is a gathering space that this month hosted its fourth Bipoc block party. It raised $10,000 for the nonprofit Our Legacy Harvested, which advances people of color in the wine industry. Founder Tiquette Bramlett, vice president at Chosen Family Wines, says many people flew in for the event. “People want to experience the magic of what we’re creating here,” she says.
An Airstream hotel room at Vintages Trailer Resort.Photographer: Wendy Wilson
Where to Stay

As the region has grown in stature, lodging options have been upgraded, too. In McMinnville the luxurious Tributary Hotel (from $775 per night), by husband-and-wife team Katie Jackson and Shaun Kajiwara, has eight suites outfitted with Ratio coffeemakers and Aria soaking tubs. Coddling service includes a multicourse, in-room breakfast from the hotel restaurant ōkta. Those seeking funkier digs might find the Vintages Trailer Resort (from $129) more suitable. Its 36 vintage trailers—including Airstreams and Silver Streaks—each come with two bicycles and access to an outdoor pool. Local pioneer Allison Inn & Spa (from $595) also remains a solid choice, with 85 rooms, a full spa and a sunny enclosed pool. The chic suites and studios at the Atticus Hotel (from $355) in downtown Mac are filled with pieces by local artists and designers.
A dish of beets and prawns from ōkta.Photographer: Susan Seubert
Where to Eat

Prepare to be left speechless, as I was, after a multicourse tasting menu at chef Matthew Lightner’s year-old ōkta. Dinner is a dizzying array of 12 creative dishes. My favorite was an homage to fire: a grilled morel with a purée of sprouting cauliflower and fresh Douglas fir, paired with a 2020 white pinot from Sequitur. Sharing a location with ōkta on Third Street, McMinnville’s historic main drag, is Humble Spirit. Simple but expert dishes include roasted carrot salad and farfalle with oyster mushrooms and green garlic cream. Chef Kari Kihara, who previously cooked at Michelin-starred Sons & Daughters in San Francisco, has a deft hand with spices and texture. At Hayward, her new restaurant in Mac Market, she’ll serve ricotta-stuffed squash blossoms, smashed cucumbers with Calabrian chili and tender roasted trout.