Eola Hills Wine Cellars – Legacy Estate

Tom Huggins spent the 1970s as an agricultural insurance specialist whose clients included many of the pioneer wineries of the Willamette Valley. That gave him a trained eye for vineyard sites, and in the early 1980s he found one where everyone else saw a wheat field: a hillside on Oak Grove Road west of Salem.

He convinced a group of friends and family to invest alongside him. They didn’t just write checks — they cleared the land, planted the vines, and learned every step by doing it. Staking, training, harvesting, sorting, crushing. The first harvest came in 1985, and in 1986 those efforts became Eola Hills Wine Cellars’ first 1,500 cases.

Forty years on, the winery remains independent and locally owned, farming more than 325 acres across the mid-Willamette Valley and ranking among Oregon’s largest producers. Steve Anderson is head winemaker, with Steve Richards assisting and Antonio Mendez managing the vineyards.

Legacy Estate is the newer property, established in 2008 and the largest of their sites at 160 acres. It sits on a southwest-facing hillside dotted with native white oaks, rising to 427 feet, with two springs cutting through the terrain and hundreds of basalt boulders stained red with iron oxide. The geology is unusual even for this AVA: volcanic activity left a basalt cap producing Jory and Nekia soils up top, while lower areas hold lighter, fossil-rich soils from marine sediments 15 to 30 million years old.

The range is broad — Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and Chardonnay at the core, with a serious sparkling program including Brut Rosé and a traditional-method Müller-Thurgau that’s genuinely rare in the New World. There are bolder reds and dessert wines too, which sets them apart from most Eola-Amity neighbors, plus a White Pinot Noir that surprises people.

The events calendar is one of the busiest in the valley: the Eola Live concert series, Twilight in the Vines dinners, Bike Oregon Wine Country rides, and international trips Tom Huggins hosts himself. The property is a popular wedding venue.