Oregon’s Willamette Valley

People come to the Willamette Valley for the wine, and they stay because of everything else — the rain-softened light, the Douglas firs, the fog that sits in the hills on a November morning. This is a landscape that produces some of the finest Pinot Noir on earth, and it also happens to be one of the great mushroom regions in the world. That's not a coincidence. The same cool, wet climate that slows the ripening of grapes and builds complexity in the fruit also coaxes chanterelles, matsutake, morels, and truffles from the forest floor. At the Joel Palmer House, we've been cooking at the intersection of those two worlds since 1997 — building relationships with the vintners down the road, sourcing ingredients from the land around us, and putting it all on the table in a 167-year-old house in Dayton that feels, on a good night, like the best possible reason to make the drive out from the city.