Bells Up Winery

Sara Specter asked her husband a question nearly twenty years ago, while watching her professional mentor fight pancreatic cancer at forty and Dave recover from the mental and physical breakdown that came after a decade as a corporate tax attorney in Cincinnati: if you’re this successful at a career that makes you miserable, how much more successful would you be doing something you love?

The answer was that life is too short. Dave left the law and went to work at Henke Winery in Cincinnati to learn the business properly, having started making wine in their basement in 2006. He won two national amateur winemaking competitions with two different wines. The Specters had vacationed in the Willamette Valley in 2008 and fallen for it; one morning on that trip Sara announced they would move here, Dave would become a professional winemaker, they’d buy vineyard property on Bell Road because the view was perfect, and they’d own a winery within twenty years.

It took four. They moved in 2012, bought a defunct Christmas tree farm overgrown with dead firs and blackberry brambles on Bell Road, and established Bells Up in 2013. First plantings went in 2014, first wines released Memorial Day 2015.

The name comes from Dave’s other life. He played French horn for more than twenty years, and “bells up” is the composer’s instruction for horn players to lift their instruments toward the ceiling and project with maximum intensity. Every wine carries a musical name — Rhapsody Pinot Blanc for Gershwin, Prelude Rosé for Liszt, Firebird Syrah for Stravinsky, Titan Pinot Noir.

The estate covers nine acres of Jory soil on a south-facing slope overlooking Newberg and the valley. Alongside Pinot Noir clones and Pinot Blanc sits the Willamette Valley’s first and only planting of Seyval Blanc — a French hybrid Dave worked with extensively in Ohio and planted here to honor where they came from. There’s Schioppettino too, a rare Italian variety. Production runs around 500 to 600 cases, and they’ve said they have no intention of exceeding a thousand.

They call themselves an un-domaine: no restaurant, no gift shop, no event lawn. One winemaker-hosted tasting at a time, by appointment, usually with Dave. Expect roughly two hours, a tour of the barrel room, and a genuine education. All wine is sold directly from the tasting room.