Lower Long Tom AVA wineries and tasting rooms

Lower Long Tom is the newest and smallest-scale of the Willamette Valley's sub-AVAs, and the honest version of its story is a short one: a single grower, High Pass Winery's Dieter Boehm, petitioned the federal government to recognize roughly 25,000 acres of distinct soil near Junction City, and got it in 2021, the tenth sub-AVA in the valley, and the first drawn anywhere in the valley's southern half.

What Boehm was pointing at is a soil type called Bellpine: shallow, well-drained, decomposed marine sediment over sandstone and siltstone, different enough from the Jory soils to the north and the alluvial ground to the east that the AVA boundary was drawn specifically around where it dominates. Cooling air off Prairie Mountain nearby pushes Pinot Noir harvest here about a week earlier than valleys farther north.

It's still a young, small AVA (22 vineyards and 10 wineries at the time it was established, in the southern reach of the Willamette Valley), and there's no critic write-up or decades-old legend to lean on yet. Antiquum Farm, which describes itself as the birthplace of grazing-based viticulture, and Walnut Ridge are both working this ground now. Watch what they do with it over the next decade rather than the last one.