Our first stop was The Gorge White House, an orchard/vineyard that actually produced both ciders and wines. Of course, we had to sample both. The eight ciders we tried were a wide variety of blends; only two of them were more traditional apple-based drinks, while the rest were made with all sorts of berries. There were enough good options that it was tough to pick a favorite. The wines were all decent, though outshone by the ciders. We got to hear about the fires that threatened the area two years ago, and also got some tips on other places in the area worth visiting.
We immediately pursued one of those tips, driving to Stave & Stone Wine Estates. They'd recently built a new tasting room outside of the main town, and it had been talked up quite a bit. With a beautiful view overlooking some of their own vineyard, it was a lovely place to relax and sample. Here, we found a couple of wines we thought worth bringing back; we've got a couple of bottles now to some day remind us of the trip.
One more winery stop took us to Phelps Creek Vineyards, a small tasting room right next to a lush golf course. Here, we were informed that it was National Wine Day! (Sure enough: May 25th.) Unlike the previous two places, this tasting room was marking the occasion with something special, two more rare wines brought out from their cellar to supplement their normal flight. Though we didn't find anything we enjoyed as much, it sure made our day out in wine country seem fortuitously chosen.
Before heading back to Portland, we stopped in town for a late lunch. The pizza at Double Mountain Brewery had been talked up in a couple of the locations we'd already visited, so we made the choice to switch from wine to beer. The pizza was... yeah, pretty good. The beer not bad, either, though we were being more selective at this point about just how much we were willing to try. After all, there was not only this place, but two other breweries a stone's throw away.
It was a one-block walk over to Full Sail Brewing Company, which I didn't associate with anything familiar until we walked through the doors and saw the giant Session Lager logo everywhere -- this is a beer widely bottled and distributed, and available in Denver. But we tasted a few things from the source anyway, since we were already there.
Lastly, we felt compelled to check out the nearby pFriem Family Brewers, held by many to be among the best breweries in Oregon. Honestly, we shouldn't have saved them for last -- after a full day, and with a drive back to Portland still ahead of us, we just weren't in the mood for trying much. We were there, we tried something, we can put a pin in the map... but I don't know that I could firmly say whether we thought highly of them or thought them overrated. The one beer we tasted just didn't make for much of a (heh) sample size.
We weren't up to much else that day after returning to our Portland hotel room. We grabbed seafood for dinner -- we always look for seafood options when we're closer to the coast. Still, even if we did had something of an early night, we'd certainly had a full day.
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