Columbia Gorge/Valley wineries and tasting rooms

Drive from Hood River to The Dalles, about 40 miles along the Columbia River, and you'll pass through nearly every growing climate the Pacific Northwest has to offer. Annual rainfall drops from roughly 36 inches near Hood River to about 10 near the eastern edge, a change of almost an inch for every mile traveled east, carrying the Columbia Gorge AVA from wet, forested Pinot and Riesling country into near-desert Syrah and Zinfandel territory before the road even leaves the Gorge.

Wine economist and University of Puget Sound professor Mike Veseth went looking for that transition firsthand and found it on a single hillside at The Pines 1852, where grower Lonnie Wright's vines "cascaded down the south-facing slope while Pinot Noir vines streamed down the north-facing side," he wrote: two different wine regions on one piece of land. Veseth's phrase for the whole appellation still holds: it's a place "trapped between two worlds," Oregon-style Pinot in the west and Washington-style Cabernet and Syrah in the east, inside a single AVA that straddles both states.

The region grows wine grapes right alongside a much older economy: apples, pears, and cherries have covered these slopes longer than vines have, and tourism tied to the Gorge itself still drives as much traffic as the tasting rooms do. What's changed is that growers now treat the climate swing as the whole point instead of a problem: plant Riesling and Gewürztraminer on the wet end, Tempranillo and Grenache on the dry one, inside a 40-mile drive.

The wineries below split roughly the same way the valley does, across the region. Note which end of the Gorge each one is working before you taste.