Tasting Room Opens for the Season
April 15th
Open Saturday and Sunday
1pm – 6pm
Curbside Pickup Available Daily by Appointment
Call 541-847-6132 to schedule a pickup appointment.
Dragon’s Vineyard wines are the realized dream of Trudy Salerno. She makes Pinot Noir and Rosé of Pinot Noir from her 2 acre vineyard in Monroe, Oregon, and offers a semi-sweet Riesling and a French-style Chardonnay.
Trudy’s path to wine stretches from her work as a veterinarian and as a member of the Army Reserve – deployed three times to the Middle East plus on many humanitarian missions to Japan and other South Asian countries. While recovering from an injury she sustained in Iraq, she took the opportunity to take all OSU’s viticulture and enology classes – which had not existed 30 years ago when she was an undergraduate.
After completing the classes at OSU, Salerno did a six-week internship at Sugarloaf Winery in New Zealand. She remembers that coming into the airport, she could see that the whole end of the South Island was covered with vineyards.
She ran the lab, testing parameters such as CO2 content, Brix (a measurement of sugar content), and pH.
In 2011, she planted her vineyards primarily with the Pinot Noir cultivar Dijon 115, with some of cultivars 777 and 667. The first three years, the vines were not allowed to ripen grapes. The fourth year, the grape crop were allowed to ripen and picked.
Dragon’s Vineyards takes its name from the Monroe High School dragon mascot. The tasting room carries out the dragon theme with an 800-pound tasting bar created by Monroe sculptor Roderick Neswick. He also carved the fireplace mantel featuring Celtic knots, grapes, and faces from a piece of 100-year-old old-growth Doug fir. The tables were made by Houston from retired wine barrels. Three levels of outdoor patios are accessible from the tasting room, edged by an herb garden.
views around the vineyard…
at left, dragon sculpture at top of Monroe High School’s cupola, the inspiration for our logo.
Trudy occasionally recruits the help of her husband Pete and son Devon.
The Vineyard
The coastal peaks of the Monroe hills provide a rain shadow and a slightly warmer micro-climate than the surrounding area, often referred to as the tropics of the Willamette Valley. The grapes grown on this well tended vineyard of Jory and Willakenzie soils produce a high quality Pinot Noir.
Our philosophy is good wine can only be made from good grapes. The grapes are hand picked, hand sorted and the wine is hand crafted in small batches under the direction of Matt Shown, wine maker of Brigadoon Wine Company.
