In 2016, I moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Salem, Oregon, to cover the business of food and beverage for the Statesman Journal. In Salem, that meant agriculture—hazelnuts, apples, nursery trees, and plenty of wine grapes. I was in my early twenties and derived my wine knowledge from anecdotes dropped by restaurant sommeliers and Paul Giamatti one-liners in Sideways.

So, like any good reporter, I started making phone calls. Soon enough, I was trudging through the vineyards of the Willamette Valley. I felt soil between my fingers, witnessed the electric green of bud break, gawked at the butterscotch cascades of autumnal vines. I whiffed ramekins of jasmine tea leaves and tobacco and cloves, learning how to identify specific flavors in the glass. I listened as winemakers explained carbonic maceration and terroir and lees, let viticulturalists show me their grafted stems and pruned leaves.

But to learn about wine, you have to drink it. And I drank a lot of it, especially pinot noir. Some were mushroomy and savory, others demure and floral, a few midnight dark in the glass with a sweetness like sticky prunes. I loved the way those bottles seemed to trap time. A rainy, cold harvest resulted in a wine that tasted like the forest. A sunny one created a wine the color of raspberry popsicles. And I drank with the farmers and craftspeople who grew and made those wines—in garages, in folding chairs, in tasting rooms, in the dirt.

Since then, the Willamette Valley has transformed, thanks to an influx of money and attention. The region is now home to a handful of high-end hotels clearly designed for a wine tourist crowd. Prix fixes proliferate at the region’s restaurants and wineries. But this isn’t a clear Cinderella story. People are drinking less. Oregon wine sales dropped between 2023 and 2024, while vineyard workers planted hundreds of new acres of wine grapes in Oregon that same year. The valley, once presumed climate resilient, now regularly grapples with scaly hot summers and pluming wildfire smoke. And so, a new Willamette Valley emerges: scrappy winemakers planting things other than pinot to adapt to a warming planet, pedigreed chefs opening their own low-key restaurants and pop-ups, Oregon-grown hospitality groups fueled by farms, wine festivals that feel less like a gala than a block party.

While working on our fall issue, I returned to some of the wines I originally tasted 10 years ago, right after I moved to Salem. They, indeed, have evolved in the past decade—more nuanced, elusive, captivating. They reflect the place from which they came: not exactly perfect, but worth savoring nonetheless.

Brooke Jackson-Glidden
Editor in chief