Hops, Prunes, and the Farms Before the Vines
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
Long before Pinot Noir, this county grew a very different set of crops, and their ghosts still stand along the back roads. Wheat came first, but by the eighteen seventies Oregon farmers, including those in this valley, were planting hops, the bitter green cones used to brew beer, and by nineteen ten Oregon was one of the nation's leading hop producers. Every harvest, thousands of pickers, whole families, Native laborers, and city folk on working vacations, poured into the valley to strip the vines by hand.
Drying the crop required a special building. Tall wooden hop dryers, or kilns, rose above the fields, filled with racks where the cones were spread while a wood fire below drove off the moisture. The same barn like structures were adapted to dry the county's other great crop, the Italian prune.
For decades, dried prunes were shipped from Yamhill County across the country, and prune orchards blanketed these hills where grapevines now grow. Walnuts and filberts, the local name for hazelnuts, followed. So when the wine pioneers arrived in the nineteen sixties, they were not taming a wilderness.
They were planting vines in soil that generations of hop yards, prune orchards, and wheat fields had already made famous for its fertility.
