Rogue Valley wineries and tasting rooms

Swiss immigrant Peter Britt planted the Rogue Valley's first vineyard in 1852, in the middle of a gold rush, on ground he'd come to for the mining rather than the dirt. It took more than a century for anyone to circle back: in 1967, an Oregon State horticulturist named Peter Lombard put in an experimental vineyard at the Southern Oregon Experiment Station in Central Point, and a handful of growers followed his lead through the early 1970s: Dick Troon, the Laynes, John Ousterhout among them. Troon went a step further in 1972, arranging for winemaker Charles Coury to teach a viticulture course at Rogue Community College; most of the class went on to plant vineyards of their own.

What they were betting on was a warm, dry valley floor with nights that drop hard, and 2Hawk Winery winemaker Kiley Evans put it plainly to Wine Enthusiast: "grapevines really like a continental, almost desert-like climate with wide diurnal temperature swings." That swing is the whole reason Bear Creek Valley, the warmest pocket of the Rogue Valley AVA, keeps drawing comparisons to Bordeaux. DANCIN Vineyards' Dan Marca named the debt directly, dedicating a wine to the Swiss immigrant: "who planted the first vineyard in our region more than 150 years ago."

The valley isn't one climate, though: it's three. Bear Creek stays hottest and driest; the Applegate Valley to the west runs cooler with pockets of real heat, like Troon Vineyard's Kubli Bench, where winegrower Craig Camp says "when the surrounding area is covered with fog, the Kubli Bench is under sunny skies." The Illinois Valley, coolest and wettest of the three, is where Foris Vineyards has been farming the southernmost vineyard in the Pacific Northwest since 1986.

Roughly 4,000 acres are planted across a valley of over a million; most of the ground is still just hills. The wineries below span all three microclimates. Taste a Bear Creek Cabernet against an Illinois Valley Pinot Gris to hear how far apart they really are.