Wine tasting in the Willamette Valley

One of the reasons for this trip was to familiarize ourselves with some of the Oregon Pinot vineyards. That is why we stayed in the Youngberg Hill Inn (a very nice B&B) right in the heart of the Willamette Valley.

I want to clear something up from the start, though. It is pronouced will-AM-it (as they say there, it's Willamette, Dammit!) not WILL-ah-met.

OK! Now that that is done we can talk a little about wine.

The very first winery we stopped at was Stoller Vineyards. (Doreen's last name). In spite of that seemingly well connected introduction, the tasting room host was decided cool to us. AND we buy a bunch of their wine! Well, we did anyway. We won't anymore.



But then we went to Archery Summit and had a great experience. The wine guy obviously loved his job, he was healthy with his pour, and we tried things we just can't get at home. We bought a bottle of their Arcus Estate wine. We brought that one home.

After AS, we went to another big one - Argyle Wines.  They have a huge tasting room on the main drag (99W, I think) in Dundee. They not only had Pinot Noir, but Bubble and Stickies (sparkling and sweet). Very nice. We bought one of their nice Pinots and drank it in Seattle (which see)

We picked up some treats (cheese and sausage) after lunch.







and finally made it up to the Willakenzie Estate vineyard in Yamhill.One of Doreen's co-workers highly recommended this wine.



They even had a Winery Cat:




We then made it back to the B and B (quite safely!)




The next day, we started out at Domaine Drouhin the following day following a quick stop at the Red Ridges Farms shop.



We really enjoyed this tour. You could see the fermentation vessels there:


We bought a bottle of their wine as well. We drank that one in Seattle, too.

Then we made our way to our favorite stop of the trip, Ayres:


We really liked the winemaker - Brad McLeroy was a very entertaining hosts, along with his dog Gigi:


He really loved what he did, and we really loved his wines. We bought two, one to bring home, and one to drink in, you guessed it, Seattle.


Gigi, greeting guests:


Note the wine barrel road markers:


Then we made it to Beaux Freres. We didn't care for them too much.


There was one more stop before we got home. We wanted to try something we had never heard of before, so we stopped at the Lemelson Winery. We really enjoyed that tour as well. They built the winery so they didn't have to use pumps. (Their slogan is "Gravity flows, Pumps suck")

I didn't take any photos, but we did buy some wine. Nice!