A Minnesota couple, 42 logged acres and a first wine in 1990.

Domaine Serene was founded in 1989 by Ken and Grace Evenstad, who came to Oregon from Minnesota. Wine Spectator reported in 2015 that they bought 42 acres in the Dundee Hills of the Willamette Valley; the winery’s own history describes the land as “recently logged” acres on a hilltop in Yamhill County. The Evenstads were not newcomers to business: Wine Spectator recorded in 2020 that in 1969 they had bought Upsher-Smith, a struggling Minneapolis pharmaceutical company, from Grace’s uncle, and grew it over the following decades.

The first wine came quickly. The company dates its first release, the 1990 Reserve, to the year after the purchase, and the Oregon Wine Press reported in 2020 that it was made in an old, abandoned electric plant in McMinnville. Wine Spectator named the vintner Ken Wright as the winery’s first winemaker. The company says it bought a 1913 building in Carlton in 1994 and converted it into its first winery, and that before 1998 the couple had no regular employees and did much of the work themselves, down to hand-labelling bottles.

Planting on the estate began in 1993 with the Mark Bradford Vineyard, named, the company says, after the couple’s son. The name that became the flagship, Evenstad Reserve, carries the family name itself; the company uses it for its top Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and marks it as a registered trademark.

Ken Evenstad died on 21 October 2020, Wine Spectator reported two days later. The company’s 2025 materials describe its estates as owned and guided by the Evenstad family.

Winery Hill, gravity flow and a Burgundy château.

Domaine Serene grew by buying neighbouring hills. According to the company’s timeline, it bought the south-facing Côte Sud vineyard in 1997, taking the home estate to 142 acres; the first 80 acres of the hilltop it named Winery Hill, a mile to the north, in 1998; 90 acres in the Eola Hills, named Jerusalem Hill, in 1999; the Triple Crown estate in 2008; land in the Yamhill-Carlton area for the Abbey Oaks Vineyard in 2011; and Two Barns, whose fruit it had long bought, in 2013. Wine Spectator put the whole holding at about 1,000 acres in 2020, with some 300 planted to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

The wine is made on the estate. The company says it completed a five-level, gravity-flow Pinot Noir winery on Winery Hill in 2001, moving in just in time for harvest, and later added a separate white winery for Chardonnay and sparkling wine, which it describes as the first of its kind in Oregon. Its range runs from estate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to Coeur Blanc, a white wine made from Pinot Noir and first released in 2006, and a sparkling programme that began with the 2014 harvest.

In April 2015 the Evenstads bought Château de la Crée in Santenay, on Burgundy’s Côte d’Or. Wine Spectator, reporting the deal that month, said it included a 15th-century château, a gravity-flow winery and about 25 acres of vines in 20 parcels across seven villages, some 40 percent of them premiers crus, and that the previous owners, Nicolas and Beatrice Ryhiner of Switzerland, had bought the estate in 2004. Grace Evenstad told the magazine they had bought “for the love of the region.”

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.

From one Oregon hilltop to a family group in two countries.

The Burgundy purchase also shows in Oregon. In May 2017 Domaine Serene opened The Clubhouse, a 30,000-square-foot visitor building in Dayton. Portland Monthly reported in June 2017 that the owners based its design on Château de la Crée, and quoted the project designer, Stephen Lapp of Waterleaf Architecture; the building is finished in stucco with copper detailing and a clay-tile roof, with underground caves for tastings. The company later opened wine lounges in Portland in 2018 and Lake Oswego in 2019.

The family’s wine holdings are now grouped as Evenstad Estates, which the company introduced in November 2025. It brings together Domaine Serene in the Willamette Valley; Château de la Crée in Santenay; Maison Evenstad, a Burgundy range made from grapes bought from partner growers; and Domaine Evenstad, an estate-grown range from the Côte de Nuits, with vineyards in Chambolle-Musigny, Nuits-Saint-Georges and Vougeot. The company says the estates share one ownership and one aim: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from distinctive sites.

The estate also looks outward from Oregon in other ways. The company says it began distilling brandy from its own Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in 2015, ageing it in barrels that include once-used single-vineyard Pinot Noir casks; its timeline dates the white winery on Winery Hill to 2018. The company’s site is domaineserene.com.

For a design guide, Domaine Serene shows how an Oregon winery borrowed the vocabulary of Burgundy — a “domaine,” named vineyards, a reserve bearing the family name and, later, a château-style clubhouse — and then went to Burgundy itself. Compare Cristom, the Eola-Amity Hills estate whose vineyards carry the names of the family’s women, and Chateau Ste. Michelle, the Washington winery in Woodinville. For this guide we use Pinot garnet, hilltop gold and limestone cream with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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