Laurelwood District AVA wineries and tasting rooms

Laurelwood District takes its name from a school built in 1904, long before anyone had named the soil underneath it: the USDA didn't formally type "Laurelwood soil" until 1974, using a sample taken from Iowa Hill inside what's now the AVA. What makes the ground distinctive isn't that the soil appears nowhere else (it turns up in patches in the neighboring Tualatin Hills too) but that it blankets this entire 33,600-acre stretch, windblown loess over basalt bedrock running as deep as six feet on the lower ground and thinning to just six inches near the ridgetops.

Ponzi Vineyards' Luisa and Maria Ponzi co-petitioned for the AVA alongside Dion Vineyard winemaker Kevin Johnson, and it became official in 2020, nested inside both the broader Willamette Valley AVA and the Chehalem Mountains that surround it. Not everyone agreed an AVA should be named after a soil type at all: three of the nine public comments on the petition formally objected. But the federal government pointed to precedent, including The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater, another Oregon AVA defined by what's underground rather than where the lines happen to fall on a map.

Dion Vineyard has been farming the same ground since 1973, three generations deep. What was about 70 vineyards and 975 planted acres at the time of the petition is still a young AVA by Willamette Valley standards. Taste the difference loess thickness alone makes, from the lighter, red-fruited wine lower on the slope to the darker, more basalt-driven wine higher up.