The Absolute Best of the Willamette Valley

Our two weeks in Oregon’s Willamette Valley were filled with wine tastings, great meals, hiking, and lots of relaxing. If you’ve never considered vacationing in the Willamette Valley, I’m here to hopefully change your mind. This week I’ll cover the things we loved most about the Willamette Valley, along with a few regrets as well.

Silver Falls State Park

Laurie and I had an absolute blast visiting the Willamette Valley last month for our long-delayed retirement celebration trip. There were so many highlights – it would take multiple blog posts to cover them all! So, in the interest of time, I thought I would share what we loved most about the Willamette Valley, along with a few things we didn’t love so much and a couple of regrets as well.

The Best Things About the Willamette Valley

• The beautiful landscape and weather. The Willamette Valley is absolutely gorgeous, and the weather simply can’t be beat in the summer – it was the perfect escape from the relentless Florida heat and humidity this summer. Morning temperatures were typically in the upper 40’s/lower 50’s, while daytime highs ranged from the mid-60’s to the lower 80’s without a lick of humidity – perfect! The Cascade mountains and the coastal range on either side of the valley provides a lush, beautiful landscape along with all the vineyards and amazing water views. There are unlimited opportunities for hiking and exploring the valley, with numerous state parks and amazing vistas at most of the wineries in the region.

The view from Alexana Winery in the Willamette Valley

• The people. Everybody we met (with one exception I’ll speak to later!) were friendly and seemed genuinely happy to have us as visitors to their valley. Most everyone seemed to be a local, and loved living in the valley and sharing their stories with us. The same was true of the staff we engaged with at the wineries we visited – they prided themselves on being careful stewards of the land, as well as the community bonds they have forged with each other over the decades. All the winegrowers as well as the local population viewed themselves as one big family, which was really nice to experience.

• The vibe of the place. The vibe of the Willamette Valley was rural, unhurried, laid back, and casual. The valley is scattered with small towns, most with a small main street with a few traffic lights. There were few if any crowds, and nobody was in a rush to get anywhere. We loved traveling the winding roads from winery to winery and taking in all the quaint and quirky aspects of the valley. We stayed two nights in Portland (not worth it – more on that below as well) and were relieved when we entered the tranquility and peace & quiet of the valley. It’s the perfect place to decompress, unwind, and relax!

Downtown McMinnville

• The wine tasting experience. Laurie and I have visited many, many wineries over the years in multiple states, but we have never had wine tasting experiences like we had in the Willamette Valley. An outgrowth of the pandemic (or so we suspect), the wineries in the Willamette Valley focus on personalized wine tasting experiences by offering mostly private scheduled tastings with a range of options that include educational experiences, food pairings, and high-end tastings focused on limited release wines only available at the winery. Each of our tastings were conducted by a dedicated staff member who was well-versed in the history of the wines and the winery. Most of our tastings took place in private rooms, and we were pampered from start to finish. In a number of cases, the staff who guided us through our tastings reached out to us after the fact to check and see how the rest of our trip was going. It was a very different experience than our tastings in Napa Valley, Carmel Valley, or Virginia wine country where most tastings were either conducted in larger groups or at tasting bars with crowds of people. This was the quintessential tasting experience, and I don’t think Laurie and I will ever be able to go back!

Wine tasting at Ken Wright Cellars in Carlton, OR

• The extraordinary wines. And finally, the 142 wines (yes, 142 – I kept count!!) we tasted on our trip were absolutely beautiful! Most were either Pinot Noir (65 wines) or Chardonnay (34 wines), and almost all of them were ethereal, sophisticated, lush, and beautifully crafted wines that stuck with you long after the glass was empty.

The Less than Best Things About the Willamette Valley

• The rural nature of the valley. This was both one of the best things about the valley, but also one of the things we liked a bit less about it. With the exception of McMinnville, which was a quaint, pretty town with a defined main street and lots of shops and restaurants, the other towns in the northern valley were quite small and some a bit run down. Which meant that dining and lodging options were somewhat limited. For example, we ate at 10 different restaurants while we were staying in the valley, and they were all great and came highly recommended. But those 10 restaurants made up almost all of the top quality restaurants that we found and that were suggested to us by the concierges at the two Inns we stayed at. The same goes for luxury accommodations – we absolutely loved the two places we stayed while in the valley, but they were two of probably four or five that would have met our criteria.

• The Tortured Winemaker. All but one of our 21 winetasting experiences was fantastic, but that one exception was a doozy! At one of our tastings, I was told about a winemaker who was a “one-man” operation that focused on making Chardonnays. I was fascinated by that, so made an appointment to meet him and taste his wines. When Laurie and I arrived for the tasting, he acted a bit put out that we were there, and then proceeded to spend the bulk of the next 45 minutes talking about himself instead of his wines. Here’s an example quote from him: “I make wine in Oregon; I DON’T make Oregon wine - do you understand what I’m saying here??” Actually dude, no I don’t and just for the record, if you make wine in Oregon, you are, by definition, making Oregon wine given the state’s strict winemaking and labeling laws. Another example: the guy was talking about how winemaking was everything to him – who he was, why he existed, etc. You know, pretentious BS. By this time, I had checked out and was ignoring him. But Laurie was trying to stay engaged so she said, “So wine is your passion”. He responded, “No, no. Wine is my OBSESSION.” Ohhhhhhkaaaaaayyyyy, … Check please! Entertaining to be sure, but definitely one of our least favorite tastings, ever!

Regrets

In hindsight, Laurie and I had just a couple of regrets or things we would have done differently:

• We’d Skip Portland Next Time. We spent our first and last nights in Portland because we thought it would be interesting and fun to explore this great city. But in reality, we didn’t find much to like in Portland. It was crowded, and the homeless problem there is a real issue (just as an aside, we simply have to do better as a country in taking care of our “tired and huddled masses”, ...). We didn’t have any issues walking around and had some good food there (we highly recommend Urban Farmer!), but there was also really nothing special about the place that made us want to go back. Next time, we would skip Portland and go directly to the Valley!

• We’d Visit All of the Willamette Valley AVAs. The Willamette Valley has 11 different American Viticultural Areas, or AVAs. These are different defined winegrowing areas within the valley, each with their own unique climate, topography, and soils. And each of these AVAs produce different styles of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. During our trip, we visited 7 of the 11 different AVAs. In hindsight, I wish we would have stepped foot in and visited wineries in all of the 11 AVAs so we could have experienced the full range of wine options in the valley. On the plus side, while we were there we did manage to taste wines from 10 out of the 11 AVAs!

I hope that quick “travelogue” provides some useful information to those of you who might be inclined to consider a visit to this beautiful winemaking area – we can’t recommend it highly enough!