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Even serious enophiles describe Oregon wines with one word: Willamette. And one grape: Pinot Noir. It's understandable. The Pinots produced in places like McMinnville and Dundee are among the very best in the world.
One thing is certain about life on an Oregon farm: There will be mud. Lots of it. We learned this firsthand during a three-night stay at Willow-Witt Ranch in Ashland, a historic 440-acre working ranch with a variety of accommodations and an appealing list of animals to tend. My family of five lives in Huntington Beach, California, where rain is rare and farms are all but a distant memory. As a passionate cook, I wanted to help my kids understand the labor it takes to raise food from the ground and give them a feel for the simple pleasures of rural life.
“We saw a For Sale sign pointing to nowhere,” recalls Witt. “We drove down and found forest land buried in four feet of snow — and an old farmhouse, built by a Swiss dairy farmer back in the 1920s.”
A few weeks later, the physician assistant (Willow) and OB-GYN (Witt) plunked down $5,000 and became the owners of 440 acres. That was 30 years ago.
While Napa Valley and Sonoma are renowned for their world-class wines, tasting trips there generally come attached to luxurious digs, spa treatments, $25 tasting fees, Hummer limos and standstill traffic — and all the “no picnicking” pretension that goes with that.
It’s gotten to the point where a thirsty, fogged-in San Franciscan in search of summer sun, stellar wine and hotel rates less than $400 a night has to go out of state, especially when toting two children under the age of 5 and a husband who prefers his fishing rod to the French Laundry.
And so, we headed north to Oregon, not to the well-known Willamette Valley, in the state’s northwest, but about four hours to its south, a sprawling region better known for the “wild and scenic” (as the official designation has it) Rogue River and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland than for the rolling vineyards in between.
We found a relaxed, blossoming wine country with empty roads and crowd-free tasting rooms — some surrounded by strip malls, others by sparkling rivers — pouring excellent versions of an impressively wide range of varietals.
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Back in Ashland, we headed up a winding mountain road to Grizzly Peak and our home for our last night: Willow-Witt Ranch, a 440-acre off-the-grid farm run by a couple of 60-something women who promised to let the kids watch the 24 baby goats milk in the morning. The ranch was stripped of all conventional luxuries, lacking even a front desk. But we had a wheelbarrow to cart our stuff, a communal outdoor kitchen (and noncommunal outdoor shower), and a canvas tent complete with two comfy beds for $125 a night.
It's called agriturismo in Italy—travel to the things that feed us—but these days it's blooming right here at home, especially in the farms and vineyards of the Pacific Northwest. Patrick Symmes pulls up a chair.
