Big Table Farm

Brian Marcy spent ten years making wine in Napa and Sonoma. Clare Carver is a painter. In 2006 they left California for the Willamette Valley, wanting to grow grapes, make wine, and have room for Clare’s animals and Brian’s projects. They made 150 cases that first year.

The name came from what they wanted the place to be: a gracious, welcoming table for themselves and their friends, covered in handmade food and wine.

Nearly twenty years on, the 70-acre Gaston property is a working regenerative farm — hens, pigs, cows, seasonal vegetables — with a barn and winery they built themselves. Brian makes the wine, mostly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with some Pinot Gris and Syrah, sourcing from a network of Willamette vineyards alongside estate fruit, with rotating single-vineyard bottlings. Clare runs the farm and paints every label. The images are of their own animals, and she keeps a gallery of the originals.

The wines have built a cult following, and most of it moves direct.

Tastings happen at the Atelier, Clare’s working art studio in a historic building in downtown Carlton. It’s a private seated experience for one group at a time, two to six people, at an actual big table in a private room. You’ll go through roughly eight current releases including single-vineyard and library bottles, and you’ll get the story and a look at how the two halves of the operation feed each other. Allow about an hour.