Purple Hands Winery

Cody Wright joined the Panther Creek cellar team at ten years old. His father Ken had founded it in 1986, four years after the family arrived in the Yamhill Valley. When Ken opened Ken Wright Cellars in Carlton in 1994, Cody was fourteen and added winery assistant to his high school activities. He and his brother Carson and their friends were, in Cody’s telling, their dad’s full-time crew.

His stepfather is Rollin Soles, founding winemaker at Argyle and now ROCO. His mother Corby Stonebraker-Soles is a partner at ROCO. After a degree in environmental science at the University of Oregon, Cody worked at Argyle under vineyard manager Allen Holstein and Soles, then Ken Wright Cellars and ROCO, plus vintages at Knappstein in South Australia and Ata Rangi in New Zealand.

He founded Purple Hands in 2005 at twenty-five, with 250 cases. Marque joined five years later and now runs the business. The name comes from harvest — hands stained purple and black and rugged from long days pushing to make something worth making. The blend label reproduces a black and white photograph of Ken Wright and Mike Etzel at a tuxedo dinner, their purple-stained hands against formal cuffs.

Recognition came quickly. The 2008 Holstein Vineyard Pinot Noir scored 92 from Wine Spectator; the Stoller Vineyard bottling later took 93 and stood among the three highest-rated Oregon wines of its vintage. Scott and Michele Campbell became partners in 2012 and own Latchkey Vineyard, one of three estate sites the winery now farms. Fruit also comes from some of the most sought-after vineyards in the state, including Shea — where Cody was given the oldest back block, the same block his father worked with at Panther Creek.

The wines are site-driven Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, unfiltered, made with an eye toward what the vineyard itself says. Two decades in, production has grown from 250 cases to several thousand.

The tasting room sits on 99W in downtown Dundee, built with green features and a deliberately unfussy feel — walkable from The Dundee Hotel and several other rooms. Bobby Heilman runs tasting rooms and clubs; guests regularly report Cody turning up with genuinely purple hands.