Wining and dining post-Turkey Day

This weekend, over 160 wineries and tasting rooms in the Willamette Valley will be open and hosting special tastings. Put on by the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, this year’s Wine Country Thanksgiving will provide an opportunity to get the relatives out of the house and tempt mom into stocking the family’s cellar with lots of delicious local wines.

Some of the proceeds from this event will go to the Yamhill Community Action Partnership, which aids low-income and special-needs families with emergency food assistance, youth outreach and other valuable social services.

Wineries from Portland to Eugene will be participating in this three-day celebration of the valley’s renowned grapes. Most of the wineries are small, family-owned operations that run all their business locally. Winemakers are likely to be found at the vineyards and tasting rooms showing off their best bottles and holiday specials over the weekend.

Argyle Winery, established in 1987 and named Oregon’s premier winery by Wine Spectator in 2000, will provide wine, cheese, local art and live music at their Dundee tasting room on Friday and Saturday. Rio Con Brio, a Portland-based duo featuring a mandolin and a guitar, will supply their charming acoustic music drawn from Latin and bossa nova influences.

Many other wineries are using this opportunity to showcase their 2008 releases. Emerson Vineyards in Monmouth and Le Cadeau Vineyard in Dundee are just two of many that will open up last year’s bottles for the first time.

It is common on this holiday weekend for carloads of distant relatives to roll into town and set their bags down for three days or more of forced family fun. For this reason, the wineries may be a good bet for an escape and a break. After all, if a few bottles of good wine can’t bring family together, what can?

The Willamette Valley is also one of the best places in the world for pinot noir. One of the most difficult grapes to grow, the finicky pinot noir loves the valley’s cool climate and benefits from a longer growing season in the region. While pinot noir is one of the more challenging and interesting grapes to grow, the valley also hosts plenty of grapes, such as pinot gris, chardonnay and pinot blanc.

It’s no surprise that the region boasts over 200 wineries and over 12,000 acres of grapes. It’s hard to drive more than a few miles in the valley without spotting another vineyard.

The Willamette Valley Wineries Association Web site provides a map and suggested routes for wine tasting so that it’s easy to discover the nearby vineyards and avoid the valley’s overly windy roads. The Web site also includes a complete list of wineries involved in the weekend celebration and some of the specials vineyards will offer.