Rex Hill

Paul Hart was an insurance man with a serious wine habit, driving back from a tasting in McMinnville in 1982, when he spotted a For Sale sign on a 38-acre property. It had gone on the market that day. He bought it immediately.

What he bought was a wreck. The building was an early-1900s fruit and nut drying facility, one of many that closed as refrigerated transport made regional drying obsolete. By the late 1960s it had become a pig farm, then a commune, then sat empty. Hart and his wife Jan Jacobsen cleared out the barn and planted Pinot Noir. Friends helped plant the first rows in 1982, and tin plates with their names still mark the ends of those rows today.

They kept one lone row of Muscat among the Pinot, left for the sweet delight of harvest visitors — it’s still there.

The Jacob-Hart Vineyard, named for the two of them, was bought in 1987. Formerly a turkey farm, it turned out to sit on at least thirteen distinct soil types, an unusually rare combination of volcanic and sedimentary ground on Chehalem Ridge. It’s now Demeter-certified Biodynamic and remains the flagship.

When Hart retired in 2007 at 66, he had five offers and chose the one he thought would carry on the work: the founding families of A to Z Wineworks — Bill and Deb Hatcher, Sam Tannahill and Cheryl Francis. Bill Hatcher had run Domaine Drouhin from its inception in 1988; Tannahill made wine at Archery Summit; Francis made the wine at Chehalem. Their first move was cutting production by nearly 80 percent, from around 40,000 cases to under 10,000, refocusing REX HILL as a boutique single-vineyard label.

The estate vineyard runs 38 acres with over 17 in Pinot Noir, dry-farmed and biodynamic, in the Laurelwood District. The winery holds LIVE certification and has been a certified B Corporation since 2014, recognized as Best for the World every year since. A multi-million dollar tasting room renovation completed in 2020 added 180 degrees of floor-to-ceiling windows over the Dundee Hills, and the original drying tunnels are still part of the building.