A Region Uncorked
Michael Donovan pours wine at the tasting room at RoxyAnn Vineyards in Medford, OR. Photo by Adam Bacher.
Here’s an excerpt:
Talent’s industrial strip along Highway 99 is lined with storage warehouses, auto body shops and junk stores. But turn down Rapp Lane and you’ll quickly find yourself on some of Southern Oregon’s most beautiful and verdant back roads, driving past white goats and a piebald horse munching dry grass and several black cows staring blankly at green hills dotted with snow.
With an extended growing season, warm weather and fertile soil, this countryside between two of the region’s fastest-growing cities, Ashland and Medford, long has been celebrated as a fruit-growing region. The first pear trees were planted in the late 19th century and dozens of eager business pioneers from the East Coast and the Midwest rushed to Oregon to buy land. But in the past 10 years there has been an enormous shift from planting fruit trees to planting higher-value grape vines. With that has come an explosion of new wineries, with more than half a dozen new vineyards planted this year alone. Currently 60 vineyards in Southern Oregon hold winery licenses.
“When we planted our grapes in 1990, there were six wineries and about 350 acres of grapes in the Rogue Appellation,” says Laura Lotspeich, whose winery, Trium, is located at the top of the hill on Rapp Lane. The Rogue Appellation extends from the California border north to Grants Pass and includes the Applegate Valley, the Illinois Valley, the Rogue River Valley, and the Bear Creek Valley. Today there are 67 wineries and over 3,000 acres of grapes planted. “Much of that growth has happened in the past five to 10 years,” says Lotspeich
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