I visited two in Battle Ground yesterday:
1. Olequa Farms: You can get some organic, free-range eggs there for $4 a dozen (and by "free range," I mean the chickens have two fenced acres to themselves, where they can eat bugs and grass and organic grain). You can also find some pretty interesting wines. Most of his fruit is from Columbia Valley WA. Brian the owner/winemaker is a chemist in his day job, which is good training for winemaking. Of all his wines, there were two I liked best: a Cab Franc rose (very full body; nice red fruits; slight RS; would be a great T'giving wine), and a Cab Sauv/Syrah blend (his most-expensive red). It's a small operation; a nice tasting room and I got a great quick winery tour.
I like Brian, and he offers very fair wholesale prices. He's growing some M.Foch onsite, which is also cool. I would encourage him to keep pushing on learning grapegrowing, because that will help him become the best winemaker he can be. It might seem like two separate specialties and in many ways they are, but I firmly believe that knowing the vineyard helps in the winery.
The bar is always being raised. Worldwide competition for higher and higher quality is brutal. There is always more that needs to be learned. This means that the winemaker should be his or her worst critic. However, the tasting room person needs to be an enthusiastic seller; perhaps one person can serve in both roles but that must be emotionally difficult.
2. Heisen House: A pretty and historic barn and farmhouse. Michele the winemaker is a former enology student of a winemaking friend of mine. She has sure learned a lot in just six years; it was great speaking with her. I thought the prices were high, but the red wines have nice structure and clean crisp fruit, and would pair well with foods, given their acid backbone. My favorite is their Cab Franc, though the Sangiovese is also up there; they're just too expensive for a remote new winery in a place not known (yet) for wineries. (Oddly, the fill level on the Cab Franc I paid $27 for is substantially too low; they need to pay more attention to quality control.)
Both these wineries are serving some wines that I viewed as on the lower end of commerciality; making good wine is HARD and this is not unusual. You just need to sort through them and find your favorites. Also, with just a few exceptions, the wines I tasted did not have aromatics to match their flavors. I am more bouquet-driven than many wine lovers are, and bouquet in wine can be difficult to capture (and it can be driven mostly by vineyard practices, foremost among those being crop yield and physiological ripeness), but since many makers do capture it, I hold it up as one indicator of whether a winemaker has reached a global competitive level.
In sharp contrast, there are other wineries in Clark County that are below the above level in terms of quality. One, East Fork, lies in a neato former cold storage building which it shares with a GREAT seafood shop--maybe one of the two or three best in the entire Portland metro and I kid you not -- but their wines were flawed, at least when I visited. Confluence has better wines than that, but at least the ones I sampled did not quite ring the bell.
But it would be fun for you to make a day trip and sample the wines of Clark County.
Amazing fact: Studies indicate that, due to Oregon's restrictive growth practices and Washington's more-freewheeling capitalism, in another 20-25 years Vancouver and points north will have more population than all of Portland metro that is located in Oregon! That seems amazing, but it makes sense. We love Oregon, but every year I notice that the roads are more and more congested, in more and more non-rush hour periods. Oregon refuses to build enough road lanes for its current traffic levels. Unless the city will put in 100mph trains that serve every neighborhood, with changeover stops never longer than five minutes, then over the long haul, the inadequate roads will crimp the city's growth. Of course, the highest state income taxes in the country don't help, either. And Portland needs to figure out how to attract more industry; its current tax structure seems to be driving industry away.
Note: WA charges sales tax on wine, but if you flash your OR drivers license, you should be able to avoid sales tax.
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