Day Wines

Brianne Day was raised a Jehovah’s Witness in a household where college was discouraged. She was on a religious mission in Italy at nineteen when a shopkeeper explained why his grapes could only ever come from that village, and wine took over her life. Her family had moved to the Willamette Valley when she was sixteen; she’d driven through it as a teenager thinking it was someone else’s world to inherit.

In 2006 she sold everything she owned and started traveling. Over eight years she visited around eighty wine regions, working harvests in Burgundy, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand — two harvests a year, taking classes between them. She reached France in 2007, early in the natural wine movement, and met the people forming it. Back in Oregon she worked cellars at nine different wineries including Eyrie and Brooks, managed Eyrie’s tasting room to learn direct sales, and sold barrels across the Pacific Northwest for a Bordeaux cooperage to understand how oak works.

She founded Day Wines in 2012 with 125 cases. Production is now approaching 20,000, across roughly 25 grape varieties from 32 vineyards — Pinot Noir and Chardonnay alongside Tannat, Malvasia, Vermentino, Aligoté, Cabernet Franc, Gewürztraminer, Müller-Thurgau, and more, sourced from the Willamette Valley down to the Applegate. Her analogy is that a single variety is a piano solo and a range of them is an orchestra playing the same place.

Everything comes from growers she knows, a majority of them women, all farming biodynamically, organically, or sustainably. Native yeast, minimal intervention, no sulfur at the crush pad because she doesn’t want to kill the microorganisms there. She was a Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40 in 2017 and a James Beard Award semifinalist in 2020, one of the few Americans at the RAW Wine Fair in London and New York.

In 2015 she opened Day Camp, a 14,000-square-foot collective winery and tasting room in Dundee — an incubator where small producers can grow their own labels under one roof. Jackalope Wine Cellars, Granville, Fossil & Fawn, Burner Wines, Ross & Bee Maloof, Bud’s Bloom, and others have made wine there.

The tasting room is modern and open: floor-to-ceiling windows, a cedar wall, a sweeping copper bar, and a courtyard with lounge seating.