Cooper Mountain Vineyards

Dr. Robert Gross was a psychiatrist with an undergraduate degree in bioengineering, making wine as a hobby in the early seventies with faculty colleagues at the University of Washington. Someone opened an early bottling of David Lett’s Oregon Pinot Noir. He later said it changed his life.

In 1978 he and his wife Corrine moved their family to Oregon to plant a vineyard on a Beaverton farm where she had grown up riding horses. They consulted Dick Erath first, who confirmed the southwest-facing slope was a promising site. The property sits on Cooper Mountain, an extinct volcano ten miles from Portland.

For nearly a decade they were only growers, selling Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to other pioneering Willamette wineries. In 1987 they converted the old horse barn into a winery and made their first vintage.

Gross’s approach to farming grew out of his medical practice. He’d become interested in integrating Eastern and holistic medicine with Western, went back to school for acupuncture and homeopathy, and extended the same thinking to the vines. Organic certification from Oregon Tilth came in 1995. In 1999 Cooper Mountain became the first winery in the Pacific Northwest to earn Demeter Biodynamic certification. In 2002 it became the first in the United States to gain label approval for a no-sulfite-added wine, and it reached carbon neutrality in 2010. Gross received the Founders Award at the Oregon Wine Symposium in 2023.

His daughter Barbara Gross now co-leads the business, second generation and woman-led. Under her the estate has grown to roughly 200 acres of vines across 325 farmed acres and seven vineyards — Old Vines from 1978, Meadowlark 1982, Corinne 1989, Farmington 1995, Johnson School 1999, Arborbrook 2001, and Chehalem Mountain Vineyard, planted by Dick Erath in 1968 and among the oldest in the Willamette Valley, acquired in 2021. Gilles de Domingo is winemaker.

Pinot Noir and Chardonnay remain the core, with Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Malbec, and a Tocai Friulano that surprises people. There’s balsamic vinegar too.