David Paige Wines

Dave Paige spent seventeen years as the winemaker at Adelsheim, one of the founding wineries of the Willamette Valley. He trained at UC Davis, worked California through the nineties, and started his first Oregon harvest days after 9/11. By the time he left in 2018, he’d made wine from dozens of vineyards across the valley and knew exactly what he wanted for himself.

He found it on a volcanic ridge on the east side of the Eola-Amity Hills. The vineyard was planted in 1996, mature and well sited, and he bought it with two friends from Indiana. They renamed it RPG for their three families. Twenty-six acres of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Blanc.

Paige doesn’t have a signature technique, and that’s deliberate. He starts every vintage with a wide toolkit and doesn’t decide what to use until he’s tasted the fruit. His line is that the fruit is in charge and his job is to help it. The Pinots come out structured and built to age without being heavy. The whites carry real richness against their acidity. Food & Wine gave both the 2018 and 2019 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 93 points and put them on its Top 50 US Pinots list.

The visit is the other reason to come. They book a limited number of appointments a day, so you get unhurried time in a room looking out at Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson. Dave often pours himself. Guests have taken to calling him the Professor, and it takes about ten minutes to understand why. He’ll talk farming and fermentation and what he learned in seventeen years at a benchmark winery, without any of it feeling like a performance.

If you want a tasting where someone actually explains why the wine in your glass tastes the way it does, this is one of the best hours in the Eola-Amity Hills.