Beacon Hill Winery & Vineyard

George Hillberry and Carla Rodríguez were driving wine country roads on a Sunday afternoon in November 2010 when they stopped at Beacon Hill. A few friendly exchanges with the owners turned up more connections than either expected. Six months later, in April 2011, the property was theirs.

The site was first established in the late 1990s by Tony Soter, before he built Mineral Springs Ranch down the road.

George spent his formative years in Brazil and Spain, though the family always came back to Oregon. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy, then USC, and moved home permanently in 2000, drawn by his family’s vineyards. He’s approaching his twenty-first Oregon harvest and runs vineyard and winery operations, happiest on a tractor or planting garlic by the barn. Carla was born and raised in Mexico, the youngest of five, with childhood trips to Casa Madero — the oldest winery in the Americas — in her home state of Coahuila. She served two years in the Peace Corps in Romania, where she found Hungarian Tokaji and fell for wine properly, then moved to Oregon in 2006 for a career in high tech. She still works as a tech executive and oversees tasting room operations and guest accommodations. The Romanian influence shows in the architecture.

The family has farmed the American West for five generations and cultivated Oregon wine grapes for more than thirty years across three sites: La Colina and La Sierra in the Dundee Hills, and Beacon Hill in Yamhill-Carlton. That means a tasting here covers two AVAs from estate fruit.

The property runs 44 acres with 22 planted to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, and most recently Albariño — a Spanish variety almost nobody grows here. Their 2022 Albariño earned 91 points from James Suckling, and they’re building a genuine reputation for it.

Two vacation rentals sit on site, a three-bedroom home and a one-bedroom cabin, alongside a guest house with a vine-covered arbor and an estate garden. The upstairs La Colina Ballroom seats 85 with vineyard views, and the lawn handles 150.