Mossback Cellars was founded in 1998 by Thomas and Elise Farrow on a fog-shrouded hillside in the Dundee Hills — forty-two acres of volcanic Jory soil that had never seen a vine. They planted Pinot Noir first, as you do in Oregon, and spent the better part of a decade learning what their land wanted to say. The early vintages were uneven, as first vintages tend to be, but the bones were good. The site was right.
Thomas had spent his career as an engineer, but he'd been drawn to wine since a trip through Burgundy in the early 1980s. What he saw there — small producers making singular bottles from specific parcels of land, generation after generation — was what he wanted to build in Oregon. Elise, a former high school science teacher with a meticulous eye for detail, brought the rigor. Together they learned to grow wine, slowly and without shortcuts.
The winery takes its name from the old Willamette Valley term for someone who knows the land intimately — who has spent enough years on it to understand its moods and seasons. That's what Thomas and Elise became. They planted the vineyard by hand, built the cave cellar themselves over three summers, and made every decision based on what the vineyard told them, not what the market was asking for.
Now their daughter Nora manages the vineyard and serves as winemaker, working with the same philosophy her parents instilled from the beginning: minimal intervention, patient farming, and complete trust in the terroir. We produce around 1,200 cases per year, sold almost entirely through our tasting room and wine club. We're not trying to be everywhere. We're trying to be exactly what this hillside asks us to be.
Winemaker & Vineyard Manager
Nora grew up in the vineyard — literally. As a child she spent summers between the vine rows while her parents figured out what the estate was capable of. She left for college in California, studied enology at UC Davis, and spent five years working harvests in Burgundy and the Central Otago region of New Zealand before coming home to take over the winery in 2016.
"The vine will tell you what the vintage wants to be. My job is to stay out of the way."
Nora has continued her parents' commitment to minimal intervention in the cellar — native yeast fermentation, gravity flow, no fining or filtration on the Pinot Noirs. Her touch is lighter than her father's was, and the wines have become more precise for it. She added Chardonnay to the estate plantings in 2017 and has since built one of the most admired white wine programs in the Dundee Hills.
The Dundee Hills are defined by their red volcanic Jory soil — iron-rich, well-drained, and capable of stressing the vine just enough to focus its energy into the fruit. We farm to emphasize that stress, keeping crop loads low and letting the vine push deep for water rather than giving it what it wants.
We've been certified sustainable since 2009, well before it became common in the valley. The certification matters to us not as a marketing claim but as a discipline — it forces you to document what you're doing and why, and it holds you accountable to a set of practices that benefit the land rather than just the current vintage.
In the cellar, our goal is to preserve what happened in the vineyard, not to impose something on top of it. That's why we use native yeasts, minimal sulfur, and very little new oak. The wine in the glass should taste like this hillside, in this year. That's the whole point.
Thursday through Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. We'd love to pour you something.