Salem wineries and tasting rooms

Ron Honeyman and John Wood picked Salem for a winery in 1933 for a mundane reason: the fruit was here. Their business was bonded on December 6, 1933, the first day it was legal to do so after Prohibition's repeal, and it started as Columbia Distilleries, turning local berries and stone fruit into brandies and cordials rather than grape wine. By 1937 the business had taken the name it still carries, Honeywood Winery, borrowed from a line in Oliver Goldsmith's 18th-century play The Good-Natur'd Man: "smooth as honey…aged in wood." It's still pouring today, Oregon's oldest continuously operating winery, and it has almost nothing to do with the reason most people now drive to Salem for wine.

That newer reason sits in the ring of hills just northwest of downtown. Bethel Heights Vineyard's Ted Casteel and Evesham Wood's Russell Raney co-authored the petition that formalized the Eola-Amity Hills AVA in 2002, and the ground stayed close enough to town that Bethel Heights, Cristom Vineyards, Zenith Vineyard, and Walter Scott Wines all still carry a Salem, Oregon mailing address, even outside the city limits. Portland Monthly flagged the AVA in 2025 as one of the valley's most overlooked pours, crediting the Van Duzer corridor's marine wind for the "chill that slows ripening" and keeps the fruit's cool-climate character intact. Forbes made the same case that same year, naming Eola-Amity Hills alongside the Dundee Hills, the valley's most decorated sub-region, as a source for the state's best Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Zenith's own directions route drivers off I-5 at the Salem Parkway exit and straight through Commercial and Marion streets before the road ever reaches the vineyard: downtown first, hills second.

Salem isn't building itself around wine tourism the way the towns up the valley are: it's Oregon's capital, a working government city of roughly 177,000 people that happens to sit closer to some of the state's most-cited Pinot Noir ground than almost anywhere else in the valley. That's a genuinely different kind of home base: fewer boutique hotels built around the wine calendar, more of the everyday infrastructure a capital city keeps running regardless of harvest season.

Start in the hills, or start with the winery that's been here since before any of them existed: Honeywood, downtown, is a five-minute stop that tells the older half of Salem's wine story. Either way, the wineries below split cleanly between two threads, a decades-old fruit-brandy tradition on one side, Eola-Amity Hills Pinot Noir on the other, both still pouring in the same capital city.