A Pittsburgh couple, a Calera winemaker and a hillside in the Eola Hills.

Cristom was founded in 1992 by Paul and Eileen Gerrie, and its name joins those of their two children, Christine and Tom, the company says. The Gerries came from Pittsburgh. The company describes Paul as a petroleum engineer who built a career in the natural-gas industry, founding his first company in 1974, and Eileen as an intensive-care nurse and mental-health therapist; in the 1980s, it says, the couple turned to wine and spent most of a decade planning a vineyard.

Two friendships set the course, in the company’s telling. The critic Robert Parker, whom the Gerries met in the early 1980s, deepened their interest in Burgundy and Bordeaux; through him they met his brother-in-law, Mike Etzel of Beaux Frères, who introduced them to the land that became Cristom. Wikipedia, citing the International Pinot Noir Celebration, says the 1992 purchase was the site of the former Pellier Winery in the Spring Valley area of Polk County, near Salem.

For a winemaker, Paul Gerrie looked to California. The company says it hired Steve Doerner from the Calera Wine Company in 1992; Paul Lukacs’s The Great Wines of America (2005), cited by Wikipedia, notes that Doerner had spent some 14 years at Calera. The Gerries admired the single-vineyard wines of Domaine Dujac in Burgundy and its use of whole-cluster fermentation, the company says. Wikipedia says the first wines were made from grapes bought from other vineyards nearby, and the company says it first bought Pinot Noir from the Seven Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills that year.

Marjorie, Louise, Jessie and Eileen.

Cristom’s best-known names belong to its vineyards. “In homage to Burgundy’s traditions,” the company says, Paul Gerrie named each estate vineyard after a woman in his family: Marjorie for his mother, Jessie and Louise for his grandmothers, and Eileen for his wife and co-founder. Each has its own single-vineyard Pinot Noir, and the company dates them carefully. Marjorie, planted in 1982 before the Gerries arrived, gave its first vintage in 1994; Louise, established in 1993, in 1996; Jessie, planted on a steep east-facing slope in 1994, in 1998; and Eileen, established in 1997 at the top of the hill, in 2000.

The oldest of them has had to be rebuilt. The company says Marjorie, its own-rooted original planting, has been fighting phylloxera for nearly two decades and has been replanted since 2004; the 2012 Marjorie, it says, was the last vintage made entirely from the old vines. Eileen, by contrast, sits at the crest of the hill between about 545 and 735 feet, and the company calls it the vineyard most shaped by the Pacific wind.

A fifth estate site honours the founder himself. The Paul Gerrie Vineyard, established in 2014 and first harvested for the 2016 vintage, is now the largest single component of the Mt. Jefferson Cuvée, the Pinot Noir the company calls its most widely distributed wine, which also draws on partner vineyards across the Eola-Amity Hills. The Louise slope also carries Viognier, first planted in 1993, and Syrah, grafted there in 2002.

The wines are made at the estate near Salem. The company says the hillside sits on volcanic Columbia River basalt soils and takes cool winds from the Pacific through the Van Duzer Corridor, and that it decided in November 2017 to broaden its farming to include organic and biodynamic principles; it had been certified sustainable through LIVE since 2007.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Oregon and Washington wineries: Domaine Serene, Cristom, Bergström, The Eyrie Vineyards, Leonetti Cellar, Quilceda Creek and Cayuse Vineyards. Wineries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single wine can be sold everywhere from a mailing list to a restaurant list.

A winery’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually grown, made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A second generation, and a second head winemaker.

Cristom passed to the next generation in 2012. The company says Paul and Eileen Gerrie retired that year and handed ownership to their children, and that Tom Gerrie became majority owner. Tom, who graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 and then joined the winery, had worked harvests from 2004 at estates including Beaux Frères and Bethel Heights in Oregon, Domaine François Mikulski in Burgundy and Tapanappa in South Australia, according to his company biography. Christine Gerrie, the “Cris” in Cristom, co-owns the winery with him, the company says, while following a career outside wine.

The cellar has changed hands too. Daniel Estrin, who spent seven years at Littorai in California, joined Cristom in July 2019 and is now listed as winemaker and vineyard manager; Chris Butler, who joined the same year, was named associate winemaker in August 2024. In 2024, the company says, Tom Gerrie took on oversight of every department, from vineyard and winemaking to finance and sales.

The company’s site is cristomvineyards.com. Its farm team, the company says, numbers 16 full-time staff, and its staff page opens with a dictionary definition of stewardship, describing every employee as a steward of the place and the land.

For a design guide, Cristom shows how a family name, coined from two children’s names, and a set of vineyards named after grandmothers, a mother and a wife can give an Oregon estate the personal, place-by-place vocabulary of Burgundy. Compare Domaine Serene, the Evenstads’ Dundee Hills estate, and Chateau Ste. Michelle, the Washington winery in Woodinville. For this guide we use Eola green, Pinot red and basalt grey with a bookish serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cristom’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.