WillaKenzie Estate

Specialties

Two for One tastings from 10am to 11am! Start your day of tasting off with WillaKenzie Estate! Enjoy our sensory garden, daily tours and breathtaking views. WillaKenzie Estate is a dramatic hillside property featuring vineyards, pastures and forest located in Yamhill County, about 35 miles from Portland, Oregon. We welcome visitors to our on-​site tasting room all year for flights of wine, food pairings, winemaker dinners, and educational seminars.

History

Established in 1995.

WillaKenzie Estate is the longtime dream of co-​founder Bernard Lacroute. After a successful career in high tech, he decided to return to his Burgundian roots and grow Pinot Noir.

Finding an Ideal Site

The Lacroutes searched for a suitable site for several years and finally purchased a cattle ranch in January 1991 just outside Yamhill, Oregon. The rolling hills of the Yamhill-​Carlton AVA are ideal for growing world-​class Pinot Noir. They named the property WillaKenzie Estate after the ancient Willakenzie sedimentary soil on which the vineyards are planted (See Dirt Matters).

The First Vines

As the Lacroutes laid the foundation for what would become a small, family-​owned winery, they knew their goal would always be to make wines reflecting the place on which the vines are grown. In 1992, they planted their first vineyards on south-​facing slopes replacing pasture, blackberries, and poison oak. Additional plantings in Yamhill continued through 2001. Today, 105 acres of vines (about a qua

Meet the Business Owner

Bernard L.

Business Owner

Bernard Lacroute grew up in a small village on the eastern edge of Burgundy, France, where he developed an early taste for Pinot Noir (instead of milk). After a classical education with much Latin, mathematics, some Shakespearean English, and vast quantities of bad Pinot Noir, he graduated with Master’s degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from the French school system.

Committed to more esoteric stuff and more bad wine, he went off to study Plasma Physics with a NASA fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he met Ronni, improved his skills in spoken English (no more Shakespeare), and survived more bad jug wines.

After a successful career building computers, then computer companies, and with a taste for progressively better Pinot Noir, Bernard decided to close the loop and return to his roots. WillaKenzie Estate is his dream to make great Pinot Noir in an environment relatively unencumbered by bureaucracy, where tradition can be blended with innovation.