Domaine Lumineux

Before he made The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola went by the nickname “Science.” He was an engineering-minded kid fascinated by experimentation, and that curiosity is the reason his Oregon winery is named after light. The original name, Domaine de Broglie, honored the French physicist Louis de Broglie and his work on wave-particle duality. In 2023 it became Domaine Lumineux — French for luminous — keeping the scientific premise while widening it.

The Coppola family entered Oregon in 2019 with a 42-acre LIVE-certified estate in the Dundee Hills, planted in red volcanic soil at high elevation just up the road from the valley’s first Pinot Noir plantings. Everything is estate-grown and single-vineyard: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris. Production runs around 6,000 cases, deliberately small. Winemaker and general manager Dave Petterson came to Oregon for graduate school, earned a master’s in cartography and GIS, and got interested in the valley’s soil geology by way of the Missoula Floods.

A fire destroyed the hilltop tasting room in late 2021. Rather than wait to rebuild, the winery moved into an 1890s Victorian on the corner of Hancock and Washington in downtown Newberg, opening there in February 2024. The building previously housed Recipe: A Neighborhood Kitchen, and the landlord chose Domaine Lumineux specifically for the goodwill it would bring downtown.