Raptor Ridge Winery

Scott and Annie Shull were both working at Sequent Computer Systems, an Intel spinoff building large servers, when Scott started tasting wine with a group of coworkers in the early nineties. It stopped being a hobby somewhere along the way. He turned up at lunch one day with plans for a wine brand and dreams of future vineyard sites.

He founded Raptor Ridge in 1995, self-taught, making wine in a renovated horse barn beside their home and pouring for friends at their kitchen counter. Annie joined as life partner in 1998 and business partner soon after. That original ethos — good wine in a room that feels like someone’s home — is still the thing people describe.

In 2000 they bought and cleared an old cherry orchard on a ridge in what is now the Laurelwood District, planting the 18-acre Tuscowallame Estate across 27 acres. The name is an indigenous word meaning “where the owls dwell,” and the winery itself is named for the families of raptors that share the property. Guests regularly watch red-tailed hawks pass by from their table. A purpose-built winery opened on the estate in 2010.

Beyond the estate, they work with eleven long-term growers including Shea, Temperance Hill, Meredith Mitchell, and Gran Moraine. The estate itself grows Pinot Noir and Grüner Veltliner, the latter thriving in Laurelwood loess soils, plus a “bubbles block” producing a traditional method Brut Rosé aged four years en tirage.

The Shulls have given as much to the industry as they’ve taken from it. Scott served as a founding director of the Oregon Wine Board and president emeritus of the Chehalem Mountains Winegrowers. Annie is president emeritus of Oregon Pinot Camp and sits on the Willamette Valley Wineries Association’s Diversity, Equity, Belonging and Inclusion Council, among other roles.

And they were the first winery in Oregon to donate a fixed amount per bottle — ten cents — to ¡Salud!, which funds healthcare for seasonal vineyard workers.