From Friuli and Madrid to a hill above the vines.

The First Generation

My father Marco grew up in Cormons, a town in the Collio hills of northeastern Italy where you can stand on a ridge and see Slovenia. His family had made wine for four generations — Refosco, Ribolla Gialla, a little Pinot Grigio when they could get the rootstock. He apprenticed at his uncle's cantina from the age of fourteen. He left for Madrid in 1985 to work a harvest in Rioja and learn Tempranillo. He met my mother in a tapas bar on Calle de Echegaray the second week he was there.

My mother Elena grew up in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid. Her father was a civil engineer; her mother taught literature at the Complutense. Elena studied architecture, finished in 1981, and was working at a small firm doing residential restorations in Toledo when she met Marco. She spoke five words of Italian. He spoke seven words of Spanish. They married in 1986.

They stayed in Spain for three years. Marco worked harvests in Rioja and Catalonia; Elena worked on a hotel renovation in San Sebastián. By the late 1980s they had a decision to make: Italy, Spain, or somewhere new. Marco's family in Friuli was selling the vineyard. Spain's wine industry was opening up but the architecture market in Madrid was tightening.

In 1989 they got on a plane. My grandfather, a Friulian who had never been on a plane, called my father a fool. My father wrote him a postcard from Portland three weeks later.

They worked in Portland for twelve years. Marco was assistant winemaker at a small Willamette Valley operation. Elena designed houses on the Oregon coast — six of them, all still standing. They saved aggressively. They had me in 1990. My mother insisted on Italian and Spanish at home; my parents fought about it; we spoke both, plus English at school, and I was a fluent translator at restaurants by the time I was eight.

Planting the Vines, 2002

In 2001 they bought seventy-eight acres in the Dundee Hills. The land had been a hazelnut orchard. The previous owner had let the trees go. There were forty stumps in the south field, a leaking irrigation pond, and a wooden barn that was condemned by the county the year after they bought it.

They paid less than seven hundred thousand for the whole property. Today that price would buy you a Portland bungalow. My father said the soil told him the land was a winery. My mother said the south slope was a vineyard. They were both right; they were also both leveraging twelve years of Portland savings.

They planted in spring 2002. Pinot Noir — three clones: Dijon 113, Dijon 115, and Pommard — on the south-facing acres, and a smaller block of Pinot Gris (clone 146) on the cooler northern slope. My father insisted on tight spacing (one meter by two meters, European-style), which our neighbors thought was foolish. The neighbors planted half as many vines per acre and made twice the fruit. Twenty-three years later, my father's wine is in Wine Spectator and the neighbors' is not.

The first usable harvest came in 2007 — the same year we finished the winery. Twelve barrels. One thousand four hundred bottles. We named the wine "Marco e Elena, 2007." My father labeled them by hand in pencil.

I was sixteen when the vines went in. I helped with the trellising. I remember my mother sitting on a bucket at the end of row 8, eating a sandwich she had wrapped in a cloth napkin, watching my father walk between the canes.

Building the Winery, 2007

The winery was my mother's last commissioned project. She designed it from a sketch she had drawn on a paper napkin in Madrid in 1988 — a wine cantina with a south-facing veranda, a vaulted-truss interior space, and a small chapel-like room for tastings. The vaulted-truss interior became the barrel room. The chapel room never got built; my parents ran out of money.

The building is Mediterranean. White-washed walls, terracotta tile roof, a grape-vine pergola over the south veranda, a small interior courtyard with a fountain that my father turned off in 2014 because he could no longer stand the dripping sound. We turned it back on for the wedding business — the courtyard is now where most couples take portraits — and my father makes a point of not walking past it.

The first vintage went into French oak barrels in October 2007. My mother sat in the unfinished barrel room and cried. My father said: "Elena, what is wrong." My mother said: "Nothing is wrong, Marco. I am tired and we are home."

The wine that came out of those barrels in 2009 was the wine that put us on the map. Wine Spectator gave the 2007 Pinot Noir Reserve a 93. The Willamette Valley wine community came to call. The winery was the building they all wanted to be photographed in.

Sofia & Diego, 2013

I came home in 2012. I had been in Portland for six years working in restaurants — front of house at Higgins, then Le Pigeon, then back at Higgins as a manager. I had met Diego there. He was the sommelier. We had been together for two years. He proposed in the courtyard at Olivara on Christmas Eve 2011. I said yes. My parents drove down to Portland the next morning with a panettone and three bottles of the 2007 Reserve.

I knew I would come back to the property eventually. I did not know it would be 2012. My father had a small heart attack that September. He recovered fully — he is, at seventy-four, still walking the rows every morning — but it was the signal we had been waiting for. My mother called me. She said: "Sofia, ven a casa." Come home.

Diego and I moved into the property in the spring of 2013. Diego built out the wine program. I learned the operations side from my father — which I had thought I understood and did not. The vineyard is a science and an accounting problem. The science I understood. The accounting was harder.

That summer, my mother said: "Sofia, why don't we have weddings here." It was a Wednesday afternoon. She was eating peaches on the veranda. I said: "Mama, this is a working vineyard." She said: "It is also a beautiful place. People should be able to get married here."

We hosted the first wedding in October 2013 — a small one, sixty guests, on the hill at four-thirty in the afternoon. The bride was a cousin of mine from Madrid. The groom was a Portland furniture maker. We charged eight thousand dollars and lost money. We have hosted twenty-eight a year ever since. We have learned to make them work.

My parents bought this land for the soil. We host weddings here for the people. Both are honest reasons.

The Next Generation

Diego and I have two daughters — Lucia (16) and Marisol (14). Lucia wants to be a vintner. She has been pruning since she was eleven; she knows the difference between a Pommard clone and a Dijon 115 from the leaf shape, which I did not learn until I was twenty-eight. Marisol wants to study marine biology at the University of Washington. She has been informed that the family vineyard will support her tuition.

My parents are in semi-retirement. They live in a small house at the south end of the property — Marco walks the rows every morning, Elena reads in the courtyard, they cook dinner together. They eat at our table on Sundays. My father offers his opinion on the wine. My mother offers her opinion on the wedding business. Both opinions are welcome and usually ignored.

The succession question is open. I do not know whether Lucia will come back to run this property the way I did, or whether the property will pass to a steward outside the family. What I do know is that the soil my father chose in 2001 is still good. The vines my parents planted in 2002 are mature now. The wine is making itself, more or less, and we are mostly just stewards.

If you are thinking about being married here, you are thinking about being married in a place that holds three generations of one family's work. I do not say that to sell you a Saturday. I say it because it is the truth of the building you will stand inside.