Amity wineries and tasting rooms

Amity got its name from an argument nobody wanted to keep having: two rival groups of 1840s settlers each wanted the new school built on their own side of the line, and when they finally agreed on a site, they named it for the truce rather than the fight. Surveyor Jerome B. Walling platted the town along Trade Street in 1859; it incorporated in 1880, a grain-warehousing stop once the railroad reached it in 1879, then a hop, prune, and hazelnut town as the crops kept changing. Vines came later still. Myron Redford planted his first acres in 1971 and founded Amity Vineyards in 1974, betting on organic, low-sulfite Pinot Noir at a time when almost nobody in Oregon made wine that way, and backing it with Gamay Noir and Riesling most growers hadn't bothered planting yet.

Brooks Wine carries a harder version of the same bet. Jimi Brooks founded the label in 1998 and planted a 20-acre estate in 2002 built around Riesling and Pinot Noir; he died suddenly in 2004, when his son Pascal was eight. Friends and fellow winemakers finished that year's vintage rather than let it go unbottled, and the label kept going: Pascal still owns it, his aunt Janie Brooks Heuck has run it since, and Chris Williams, Jimi's longtime friend, has made the wine since 2005. The estate went fully Biodynamic in 2012, a slow continuation of a project its founder never got to see through himself.

That pattern, ground and story passed on rather than sold off, describes most of Amity's wine map today. Coelho Winery, founded in 2004 by Dave and Deolinda Coelho, is now run by their son David. Amity Vineyards itself changed hands in 2014, when Ryan Harms of Union Wine Company bought the name and the estate; Redford, announcing the sale to Oregon Wine Press, put it plainly: "I'm selling to a local group, not a big corporation." The estate now runs 26 acres of volcanic Witzel and Ritner soil, with own-rooted vines more than fifty years old, on ground the winery calls the oldest continuously farmed estate in the Eola-Amity Hills. That AVA now carries a first for the whole state: in 2025, Decanter awarded Oregon's first-ever 100-point score to a wine grown there, Bethel Heights' 2023 "The High Wire" Chardonnay.

Amity still reads like the farm town it was before any of this. Hazelnut orchards give way to vine rows without much warning on the drive in, and the stops in between are as much a part of visiting as the tasting rooms: Wings and a Prayer keeps a herd of alpacas a few miles out, and the Brigittine Monastery sells fudge and chocolate the monks make themselves. Pick whichever winery's story pulled you in, the fifty-year vines, the biodynamic Riesling, the family still pouring behind the same counter their parents opened, and start there; the rest of the list below is close enough to visit in the same afternoon.