Carlton

Carlton's food-and-drink record is inseparable from wine. For most of the twentieth century the town was a working mill and farming settlement rather than a tasting-room destination; the conversion came in the 1990s and early 2000s, when producers and custom-crush operators took over old industrial and civic buildings downtown, turning a few blocks into a place where many labels could pour.

Ken Wright founded Ken Wright Cellars in downtown Carlton in 1994, organizing his work around single-vineyard Pinot Noir; he also authored the petition for the Yamhill-Carlton AVA, approved December 9, 2004 and effective February 2005 — roughly 59,000 acres centered on Carlton and Yamhill, defined by ancient marine sedimentary soils and the Coast Range rain shadow. In 2003 Wright and his wife, Karen, bought the town's 1923 train station and restored it as a tasting room. Earlier, in 2002, the Carlton Winemakers Studio opened as the Northwest's first alternating proprietorship and first winery built to LEED standards, founded by Eric Hamacher, Luisa Ponzi, and Ned and Kirsten Lumpkin after Hamacher pushed to change Oregon law permitting multiple wineries to share one licensed facility.

The surrounding appellation supplies the older lineage — Elk Cove Vineyards was first planted in 1974 — and outside capital arrived when Maison Louis Jadot acquired Resonance Vineyard in 2013.