General Info

After a well-traveled career in the airline industry, proprietor Rod Gilstrap with wife Jeanne retired to their childhood roots in the Grande Ronde Valley. Together, Rod and Jeanne, along with their adult children, planted grape vines on the hillside above Cove. Their estate property in a long standing cherry orchard was chosen for its scenic beauty and situated such that Rod and Jeanne could look out over the valley, as well as their vines and watch their latest hobby grow. At just over three thousand feet in elevation, the Gilstrap Vineyards started as an experimental site. Just what type of wine grapes could we grow at three thousand feet and forty-five degrees north latitude? Rod had flown around the globe enough to know that the winters of eastern Oregon were no less severe than the wine growing regions of Germany and northern France. Rod was told that wine grapes would be a real challenge at these northern latitudes where they had built their estate home. What the nay Sayers didn't know was that Cove has been home to some of the best fruit-growing efforts in all of the Pacific Northwest. Rod and Jeanne started their vineyard plantings with French hybrid vines- vines that would be winter tolerant as well as disease resistant. From these early plantings in 1993, first hobby wine vintages were produced in 1995. Some of these wines were actually drinkable! From these roots, Gilstrap Vineyards have produced nearly a dozen different wines.