How do you turn on the tractor?

The hype couldn’t possibly be true: Winemakers raving about their wines. Media gushing about their Pinterest-worthy barn-turned-tasting-room. Friends telling me that I just had to check out Hazelfern.

And you know what? It’s all true. And even more so, you’ll be immediately charmed by Bryan and Laura Laing. For eight years, they had been making wine in the basement of their Northeast Portland home, right there on Hazelfern Place, five gallons at a time.

In 2014, after a “quarter-life crisis”, they picked up their two daughters and a ping-pong table and moved to a farm outside Newberg. Two city kids, five acres, a horse barn, and a tractor they didn’t know how to use.

Today, they’re rising stars in Oregon wine – and farmers in the truest sense of the word. Their daughters have collected a menagerie of dogs, cats, and chickens. The horse barn is indeed Pinterest-worthy, and the wines… well, they’re extraordinary. Their joy, their hard work, and their awesome sense of humor about it all just sings with everything they do.