Why Is Oregon Producing So Many High-Quality, Affordable Wines?

By WineBottleMag
September 25, 2025
Affordable HighQuality Oregon Producing Wines
With 0 comments

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about wine is that the more you spend on a bottle, the better it will be. The truth is, there is astounding value to be discovered from wine regions around the world, and you can find great bottles for $20. You just need to know where to look.

Wine Enthusiast just published the 2025 Top 100 Best Buys list, a roundup of affordable wines that are actually worth drinking. Every year, our reviewers taste 25,000 wines, and the Best Buys are their favorites for $20 or less. Almost all of these bottles scored 90 points or higher, so you can’t go wrong with any wine on this list.

I love the Best Buys list because it’s so eye-opening for people who mistakenly think that they can’t afford excellent wine. One thing that stuck out to me about this year’s list was that eight of the bottles came from Oregon. That’s a lot for one state. Oregon is responsible for just 2% of America’s wine production every year, yet it landed eight bottles on this international list.

Why is Oregon producing so many top-scoring Best Buys? I spoke with Wine Enthusiast Writer-at-Large Michael Alberty, who reviews Oregon wines, hoping he could shed some light on why the state’s affordable bottles are drinking so well right now.

The Highlights

On why so many Oregon wines are Best Buys

Michael Alberty: It was great to see that nearly 10% of the list is from Oregon. It didn’t surprise me that much, because over the last year, as bottles have been coming in for review, I’ve been noticing more and more Oregon wines of various grape varieties that sell for less than $20 that end up getting pretty decent scores.

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In years previously, 20, 30 years ago, in Oregon, it was almost impossible to find a Pinot Noir that was under $20 that you might want to actually drink. That kind of changed in 1992, when Firesteed Winery started with a gentleman named Howard Rossbach, and he decided he was going to start making Oregon Pinot Noir that would sell for significantly less than $20 that was made with intention.

On Oregon’s supply-and-demand problem

MA: There’s just not enough demand to meet how many vines are planted [in Oregon], and so that provides people with a lot of opportunities to buy fruit at a per-ton of cost that in the past would have maybe been unheard of.

So if people want to make wines that come in at under $20 a bottle, they can do that more easily. Now, I heard one winemaker tell me that at the moment that they thought that there was like a million liters of bulk Pinot Noir juice out there floating around to be tapped into. And that, to me, gives an indication of how much juice and how many grapes are out there for people that want to make less expensive wines, or to make or take a stab at it, whether that means creating a new label or adding a new line to your current existing portfolio. I’ve seen both things happening.

The other thing is that people are more able to cut costs now. I think the days of exclusively hand-picked fruit in Oregon are gone. We’re seeing more and more mechanized farming to cut labor costs in particular.

On Oregon wine’s global moment

MA: The state is unabashedly proud of what’s been accomplished. And for a region like the state of Oregon—if you just look at the state of Oregon—the total production in terms of what’s the amount of wine made in the entire world, Oregon’s making an infinitesimal little amount of wine. And yet, wineries in Oregon get some serious global attention for the quality of the wines that are being made now.

So the recognition of the quality that comes along from all the various publications and whatnot is so out of proportion to the amount of wine that we actually make. So people are very aware of that, and are still proud to be out there and marketing the wines for the quality of the wines. But that’s the tension that’s occurring now.

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As one winemaker told me, we’ve “over-premiumized” the situation, and we have too many wines that are in the $50, $60, $75 and higher range, and not enough options in the middle range and the lower range.

One winery Michael recommends for incredible value

MA: Foris in Rogue Valley. They’ve been here for so long, but since they’ve been around so long, maybe they don’t get the attention that they deserve.

They have a range of wines that are under $20 and the quality on them is like… how did they do this for this money? The wine that they’ve got on the list, the Fly-Over White, which I think is like an early Muscat-Riesling blend, is just a really, really nice white wine.

They make a Pinot Noir with fruit from Southern Oregon called Six Stones. That’s under $20 a bottle and really, really, really good. It just came through for review a couple of months ago, and I sat there and thought, wow, that is a really good wine for that price point.

The Guest

Michael Alberty reviews wines from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North & South Dakota, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Wisconsin, Wyoming & Canada. He writes about wine for The Oregonian, the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. West Coast. He turned to wine writing after 16 years in the retail wine trenches of Illinois and Oregon. He has written about wine for publications based in England, Australia, and the United States. He has also published work in the fields of international environmental politics and major league baseball. Earlier in his life he tended bar in Portland, pulled espresso shots in Seattle, and made sandwiches with a famous bluegrass banjo player in Champaign-Urbana.

More About the Podcast

The Wine Enthusiast podcast is your serving of drinks culture and the people who drive it. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Visit the podcast homepage for more episodes and transcripts.

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