Hood River wineries and tasting rooms

Hood River's timber economy was cratering, unemployment near 20 percent, when thirteen windsurfers tried to sail from Cascade Locks to Hood River in 1980 and none of them made it: their gear couldn't handle the wind. Four years later the town had four windsurf shops and two hundred competitors at its own Pro-Am. The same wind that rebuilt one industry was already reshaping another: growers on the hillsides above downtown were starting to plant vines on old orchard ground, betting that dry, constant air could do for grapes what it had just done for sailcloth. It wasn't virgin ground either way: Hood River's first fruit trees went in back in 1855, and the valley still carries roughly 14,500 acres of pears, apples, and cherries strung along the 35-mile Fruit Loop that outdraws the wineries for visitor traffic most Saturdays. Condé Nast Traveler weighed the trade-off in 2025 and came down on the side of wine: "if you're focused on wine tasting and waterfalls, stay in Hood River."

Bob Morus was flying Delta jets out of Portland when he went looking for a hillside of his own. In 1990 he drew a 90-mile radius around the airport on a map and it landed him on 60 acres in Hood River's west hills, orchard land he replanted to Pinot Noir. Phelps Creek Vineyards is still on that ground; the winery brought on Alexandrine Roy, a fourth-generation Burgundy winemaker, as director of winemaking in 2007, and Morus's founding logic still holds: "there are no shortcuts when the goal is the finest expression of a specific vineyard," the winery's founding story goes.

A few miles down the valley, The Pines 1852 works eight acres of Zinfandel vines planted in the late 1800s that grower Lonnie Wright found sitting fallow for twenty years when he arrived in 1982. At Marchesi Vineyards, Franco Marchesi planted an old apple orchard in 2003 on a hunch about the climate: "the climate and soil here are just like Northern Italy," he says of the Piemonte hills he grew up in. Between them, the two wineries make the case that one valley can finish a pre-Prohibition Zinfandel and an Italian-style red within a few miles of each other.

The valley's newest chapter looks nothing like either bet. At Hiyu Wine Farm, Master Sommelier Nate Ready and artist China Tresemer bought seven acres in 2010 and let cows, chickens, and pigs graze the vine rows; Ready's reasoning for planting a dozen-odd varieties instead of chasing one: "if you can grow a variety, it's nice to have different expressions," he told Oregon Wine Press. Portland Monthly called the whole valley "a wine wonderland" back in 2016, "pocketed into a mere 40 square miles" alongside more than 45 grape varieties in the ground; most wineries here will fly your bottles home for free, and just as many keep bike racks out front for riders coming down off the wind-scoured hills above downtown. Taste a Zinfandel against a Riesling from the same square mile of the Columbia Gorge AVA, then decide whether Hood River is a fruit valley that grew vineyards, or the other way around.