Explorer Ponce de León abandoned his quest to discover the mythical land of wine after a tumble into the Fountain of Youth left him eternally underage. Take up his journey with today’s Groupon: for $25, you get a wine tasting for four and a $25 credit in the tasting room at Amity Vineyards in Amity (a $57 value).
Amity Vineyards' in-house wine tastings coat patrons' palates with selections of its award-winning wines. Quartets imbibe a sampling of five to eight pours of vino, searching out favorite notes, bouquets, and aromas like sommelier-certified bloodhounds. Inspired taste buds can then mosey over to the wine shop with their $25 credit and obtain their preferred fruit fermentations, adopting bottles such as the 2007 Late Harvest Estate riesling ($20), 2009 Yin Yang rose ($8), or the 2008 Willamette Valley pinot noir ($18). One of Oregon's oldest wineries, Amity also cultivates views from its scenic picnic area, inviting groups to sit back, relax, and fashion corkscrew art out of braided grass.
Amity Vineyards
Myron Redford blazed his own trails while learning to create world-class wines from Willamette Valley-grown grapes. After purchasing a vineyard in 1974, he spent the next two decades adopting innovative methods and pioneering new varietals. In addition to exploring low-sulfite wines and organically grown grapes before many of his peers, Myron also replaced all of his chardonnay vines with pinot blanc and forging wines with gamay noir, a little-used grape among American winemakers. This combination of intuition and experimentation established the winery's reputation for forging distinctive, Old World-style wines with a deft balance of crisp acidity, fine tannins, and rich fruit flavors.
Every year, 15 acres of estate-grown pinot noir, riesling, and pinot blanc ripen on Amity Vineyards' vines, and the head winemaker, Darcy Pendergrass, secures the rest of the grapes from vineyards throughout the northern Willamette Valley. After the tiny fairy on staff juices each individual berry with magic, the staff then allows the concoction to ferment and mature before siphoning the wine into bottles. Visitors can then sample these bottles from the comfort of a tasting room that overlooks the Oregon Coast Range.
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