Brandborg Vineyard & Winery

The tasting room on Highway 38

The Brandborg tasting room stands on First Street in Elkton, Oregon, in a two-story building just across the sidewalk from Highway 38, a popular route to the coast. A flight here is four wines for $15, and the charge is refunded with a three-bottle purchase. Dogs are welcome on the patio. Parties of four or more are asked to call ahead.

The main red is pinot noir. The main whites are pinot gris, riesling and gewürztraminer, which the winery describes as Alsace inspired. A few other niche reds are made so the tasting room has some variety, and they are not sold in distribution. The grapes come from the Brandborgs’ own vineyard and from several other small vineyards around Elkton: Bradley, Anindor, Michaels, Elk Valley and Hundredth Valley. Between its own label and custom wine made for a few other labels, the winery averaged about 10,000 cases a year by 2022. By then Brandborg wines were sold through distributors and outlets in 20 states.

Terry and Sue Brandborg built this place and still run it. Both are self-taught in winemaking and grape growing, according to the winery. Sue Brandborg told The News-Review in 2022 that the cool climate gives a grape and a wine with high acidity and lower alcohol. “That’s the type of wine I enjoy,” she said.

A hillside five miles west

Elkton lies 36 miles inland from the Pacific. The winery reports a long frost-free season, with cool, temperate weather lasting until late fall and average July and August highs of only 83 degrees. The town itself sits low. “The elevation here is only 142 feet and there’s a pretty gentle flow of cool breezes with fog from the Pacific Ocean,” Terry Brandborg said.

The vineyard is out of town, on a southwest-facing hillside 5 miles west. The winery’s own account says the property rises to 1,100 feet, with a direct sightline to the Umpqua River and the Coast Range. The Oregon Wine Press gives the planting as five acres of pinot noir at 1,000 feet. The Brandborgs first meant to build “a modest winery and tasting room” beside the vines. They soon saw that the hillside would limit their retail trade, and so they built in town on the highway instead.

The road to that hillside began in a garage. In 1986, by The News-Review’s account, Terry Brandborg began u-picking grapes and making wine in his Northern California garage. He then carried samples into San Francisco retail shops and restaurants to sell what he had made. The label was Brandborg Cellars. The Oregon Wine Press credits him with 15 years in the California wine industry under that name.

He met Sue at a wine festival and tasting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Both of them say she found the wine first. “She loved the wine before me,” Terry told The News-Review, with a smile. “Then she went looking for me.”

They married in 2001 and looked up and down the California coast for vineyard land. They found they could not afford California’s land prices. The Oregon Wine Press adds that they also carried an affinity for cool-climate varieties and “a healthy wariness of climate change.” Friends in Sutherlin, Oregon, drew them north. On visits there the couple toured Douglas County wineries and met Richard Sommer at Hucrest Winery, Philippe Girardet at Girardet Vineyards, Scott Henry at Henry Estate Winery and Earl Jones at Abacela Winery. It was Jones who encouraged them to look at Elkton. “I found the climate data from the state forestry nursery (near Elkton) and it was a bull’s-eye for what we were looking for,” Terry said. “Elkton is always the coolest of the Umpqua areas that grow grapes.”

All of it happened in 2002. They bought the hillside, and some high school students helped them plant five acres of pinot noir. They crushed their first Elkton vintage, about 2,500 cases. The tasting room opened Thanksgiving weekend, pouring pinot noir and riesling that Terry had made earlier for the Brandborg Cellars label. For a time the two of them were the whole crew. The News-Review says they kept it that way until three years later, when they made 6,000 cases and hired help. Terry puts it slightly differently: “We grew our brand from 2,500 cases to 6,000 in the first four years.” His two sons had worked for him back in California. “I called them my forced labor on weekends,” he said.

Drawing the Elkton line

As the Brandborgs and their neighbors found a market, they pressed to have the area recognized as its own American Viticultural Area. Terry Brandborg, John Bradley of Bradley Vineyard and Mike Landt of River’s Edge Winery led the effort on behalf of eight vineyards and five wineries. In 2013 the Elkton Oregon AVA was designated within the Umpqua Valley. The winery explains its purpose as setting the area apart from the much warmer microclimates found across most of southern Oregon.

An Oregon Wine Board fact sheet updated in 2017 lists the AVA at 100 planted acres. It gives clay loam as the predominant soil and pinot noir, pinot gris, gewürztraminer and riesling as the main varieties. The sheet calls Elkton the coolest AVA in Southern Oregon. It attributes the cool to strong afternoon breezes up the Umpqua River gorge, and it says the water-holding clay means less irrigation and lower yields.

On June 7, 2013, the same year as the designation, Linfield College archivist Rachael Cristine Woody recorded a 22-minute oral history with Terry Brandborg at the winery for the Oregon Wine History Archive. In it he talked about his search for pinot ground, about making wine in California and in Oregon, and about the Elkton designation. The archive notes that its Southern Oregon interviews were recorded on site and may carry background noise from the winery or the tasting room.

Terry also took on work for the wider valley. He was twice president of the Umpqua Valley Winegrowers Association, from 2007 to 2010 and from 2016 to 2020. From 2010 to 2014 he sat on the Oregon Wine Board, which has a marketing budget for Oregon wines. He joined it, he said, to make sure the Umpqua Valley got its share. “We want to do what we could to help the growth of the wine industry, to make the Umpqua Valley area better known and more of a destination,” he said.

A turnkey sale

In 2022 the couple still spoke of the work as play. “We love what we’re doing. It’s still fun,” Terry said. Sue agreed: “The job stays challenging because it is always changing so you don’t feel like you can learn it all.”

By May 2025 the Oregon Wine Press reported that the Brandborgs were selling the winery as part of their succession plan. The growth and the custom crush business, Terry said, “took a toll. We love to travel and haven’t been able to carve out time to do as much as we would like.” His sons have gone on to creative careers of their own, as has Sue’s daughter. “If I had family who wanted to take it over, that would be the ideal… but we don’t,” he said.

The listing includes all the equipment, the wine inventory and the brand. Terry described it as “a turnkey situation where someone can move right in and start making wine.” A buyer could sell through the remaining wine and start a new label, and he said that would not matter much to him. “What’s most important is selling to someone who recognizes the quality of what we’ve been able to do and the caliber of our region.”