Eastern Oregon wineries and tasting rooms

Eastern Oregon isn't wine country in any conventional sense, and the two wineries in this directory don't pretend otherwise. Copper Belt Wines, working small lots out of Baker City in the state's high-desert Copper Belt, makes European-style wines inside the sliver of Oregon that falls under the Snake River Valley AVA, grape country by federal designation, if not by local habit. Farther west in Mount Vernon, David Hamilton Winery doesn't work with grapes at all: huckleberries picked from Mount Adams, wild plums gathered along the Snake River, fermented without added sulfites.

That split (one winery chasing a real AVA designation, the other making do with what actually grows wild out here) is close to the honest story of the whole region. Eastern Oregon's climate is a driver's-seat argument for why so few people have tried: a rain-shadowed high desert with wide day-to-night temperature swings and, in places, under ten inches of rain a year, closer to true desert than anywhere else the state grows a fermentable crop.

There's no legend to tell here yet, and that's fine: this is a frontier still being tested rather than a region with a settled answer. Both wineries below are doing something that isn't easy, and that's the draw.