Hamacher Wines

Eric Hamacher grew up on the Monterey Peninsula and came to wine through restaurant work. He’d been headed toward medicine. Wine won.

He earned a fermentation sciences degree from UC Davis in 1988 and spent the next seven years following harvests around the world, landing jobs in California with Mondavi, Chalone, and Etude. In 1995 the pull toward Pinot Noir took him north, and he founded Hamacher Wines in the Willamette Valley.

Then he changed the law. At the time, Oregon didn’t permit multiple winery licenses in a single facility. Hamacher lobbied the legislature for years until it did, and in 2002 co-founded the Carlton Winemakers Studio with his wife Luisa Ponzi — winemaker at Ponzi Vineyards — and partners Ned and Kirsten Lumpkin of Lazy River Vineyard. It was the first facility of its kind in the Northwest, and the template for every shared winemaking space that followed.

After the big 2014 harvest stretched the studio’s seams, he moved his own production out. In 2015 he relocated to the original Ponzi Historic Estate in Beaverton, established in 1970, and opened his first tasting room — now operating as the Winery Lane Collective. It sits among towering firs beside one of the oldest vineyards in the Willamette Valley, and it’s the closest Willamette winery to Portland.

Production is just shy of 2,000 cases a year, which he’s called possibly Oregon’s slowest-growing winery. He sources from up to a dozen small vineyards, favoring old vines and low yields, and he ages the Pinot Noir deliberately before release — historically eighteen months in barrel and another eighteen in bottle. That means the tasting room regularly pours vintages a decade back, which almost nowhere else does.

He also makes the wine at Ghost Hill Cellars and consults for several other labels.