American Wine Legend Ed King Turned Pinot Gris Into an Oregon Powerhouse

• By WineBottleMag
• October 27, 2025
• American Gris King Legend Oregon Pinot Powerhouse Turned Wine
• With 0 comments

The success of King Estate Winery has been driven by stewardship, family, and tradition. Sticking to those core values for 34 years has helped Ed King transform Oregon Pinot Gris into a powerhouse wine.

When it comes to being called a legend, King Estate’s co-founder and co-CEO humbly deflects. “I don’t do singular; it’s all a team deal,” King said.

The legendary part of the story, King says, is the persistence it took to get Pinot Gris established as a wine category in the United States. While he wasn’t the first to plant Pinot Gris in Oregon, King said that “no one had their sights on building a national business by making enough wine and presenting it to distribution and accounts across the country. We did that, and you can say we broke a lot of trail, but it was a heavy lift.”

What made the lift a little easier was the food-friendly style of King Estate’s Pinot Gris. “We went for a user-friendly stainless steel-fermented Pinot Gris that sees no oak, and we continue to advocate for it. Think Alsatian Pinot Gris,” he said.

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King Estate’s Willamette Valley Pinot Gris is also budget-friendly—it recently made an appearance as #6 on Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100 Best Buys list.

Ed and his father, Ed King, Jr., founded King Estate in 1991. Their origin story traces back to Kansas City, Missouri, where his King, Jr., a pioneer in the avionics industry, founded King Radio Corporation in 1959. King spent his summers working the assembly line and other jobs at his father’s company. There, he said, he learned that you earn a customer by consistently providing a superior product at a superior price. “You aren’t entitled to get and keep a customer because of much else,” King said.

When his father sold King Radio in the mid-1980s, his idea of retirement was to help his son build a winery. The 600-acre property they settled on was a hay farm, with horses and dusty gravel roads, located near Eugene in the southern Willamette Valley. King said it reminded him of Kansas.

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Today, the King Estate property spans 1,033 acres, with 460 acres planted primarily to Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir. After years of organic certification, in 2016 King Estate became the largest Demeter USA-certified biodynamic vineyard in North America. The combination of estate fruit and fruit sourced from approximately a dozen other vineyards will allow King Estate to produce approximately 250,000 cases in 2025. 

Another lesson King learned from his King Radio days is that “We are here to build and make things better for everyone, including our communities. What purpose is there in using your life to build anything else?”

King has helped his community through his philanthropic efforts, including the establishment of a cardiac care center at the region’s largest hospital and the founding of Oak Hill School, a college preparatory school in Eugene.

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The post American Wine Legend Ed King Turned Pinot Gris Into an Oregon Powerhouse appeared first on Wine Enthusiast.

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