Eaglemount Wine & Cider

A hand-painted sign stands at the entrance on South Jacob Miller Road. It shows brightly colored bottles of cider, mead, and wine, with the name Eaglemount Wine & Cider lettered in typewriter type. Visitors park in the Palindrome lot, climb the first stairs they come to, and follow the porch around the front of the building to the right. The tasting room door is there, open Saturdays and Sundays from noon to five.

A yacht club, moved inland

The tasting room building served for many years as the Port Townsend Yacht Club, in its old location at the Boat Haven. Someone moved it to this unlikely spot in the late 1980s. When the present owners took it over, they found the original fir walls and floors under linoleum and paneling. They built the bar from timber beams salvaged from a downtown Seattle building. One of Trudy Davis’s sons, a designer architect, drew the plans. The family added a deck and hung large barn doors on the wine cellar below.

A tasting is four pours, chosen from whatever wines and ciders are on the list that season, for a $15 fee. Everything is also sold by the glass for the deck. The snack case holds local goods: cheese from Mt. Townsend Creamery and Chimacum Valley Dairy, fish from Crimson Cove Smoked Specialties, and Chocolate Serenade chocolates. A Jefferson County Farmers Markets profile from 2025 adds cheeses from Marrowstone Island, Poulsbo, and Ferndale, and taps of BluJay Kombucha. “We try to do local because I think it’s just good business,” Trudy Davis told the market’s writer. “It helps everybody out.”

Two ciders, the crisp Homestead Dry and the earthy Log Cabin, are pressed from the original homestead orchard. Sweeter bottles include raspberry ginger, cranberry quince, and lavender pear quince. The meads are fermented with freshly pressed juice along with the honey. The honey comes from Sailing S Farm in Sequim. “We started doing a lot of meads because I’ve got a local honey connection,” Trudy said, “and people are loving the meads.” The red grapes come from small vineyards in eastern Washington. Eaglemount Red, the house blend, has taken several gold medals at the Seattle Wine Awards, and the Seattle Times put the Quince Mead on its “50 Best Wines” list in 2022. Bottling help comes from Port Townsend Vineyards, where another of Trudy’s sons makes wine. On weekend mornings the same bottles are on sale at the Port Townsend Farmers Market on Saturdays and the Ballard Farmers Market on Sundays.

The barn the jugglers named

The tasting room adjoins a barn that was used as a dance hall sometime in the 1920s. The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggling troupe bought it in 1986, made it into a practice and rehearsal hall, and named it the Palindrome. Their hand-painted Palindrome sign still hangs behind the stage. The original artist restored it. The troupe has come back for New Old Time Chautauqua shows. The hall has about 1,700 square feet of hardwood dance floor under a 20-foot ceiling, with a wrap-around deck, many doors and windows, and room for 120 people.

The October 2026 calendar shows what goes on there. Peninsula Ecstatic Dance meets on October 7 and 21 and again in November. Bonnie Medicine plays with Aimee Ringle on October 8. The Nick Moss Band, with Jason Ricci, plays October 9. Abbey Arts presents Nights of Grief & Mystery, a musical and theatrical program, on October 16. Family Mystic and Micaela Kingslight play October 24, and the Tannahill Weavers, presented by Rainshadow Recording, play October 27. Each year the hall also serves as the Cider Saloon for the Olympic Peninsula Apple and Cider Festival.

Arcadia, since 1908

The barn, the tasting room, and a large manor house stand together on twelve acres of mixed farm and woodland called Arcadia. According to the estate’s own account, Arcadia has stood at the edge of Port Townsend since 1908. In that time it has been a private residence, a hazelnut and fruit farm, a brewery and speakeasy, a brothel, a boarding house, a bed and breakfast, and a base camp for a vaudeville circus. The owners write that they are bringing the property back to many of its past glories, “with the possible exception of the brothel.” An orchard on the grounds dates from 1908, and wisteria blooms on the property in spring.

The manor house is now the Arcadia Inn. It is a three-story Craftsman house in the Arts and Crafts manner of the early 1900s, with intricate woodwork and large windows looking out on the country. Every room has a private bath. Guests share a living room on the ground floor and a large porch with brick pillars that overlooks the estate. Trudy’s grandson is the innkeeper.

The estate had been on and off the market for years when the Davises bought it in the fall of 2014. The house stood empty, and they furnished it with antique furniture, lace curtains, and oriental rugs. “The only way we could actually make the payments was to have the inn operating, and the tasting room for our stuff,” Trudy said. “And it’s worked. It’s been a huge challenge, but that’s what keeps it interesting.” The owners say they plan to add a vineyard, more orchards, and other crops.

An orchard seen in bloom

The business takes its name from an older farm on Eaglemount Road, southeast of Discovery Bay. In 1980 Jim Davis saw an orchard in bloom from across the valley there. The farm had been abandoned for scores of years and its road had grown over. He pushed through the brush and found a cabin with its roof caved in and its foundation rotted away. He bought the property, put in a new foundation, and roofed the cabin with shakes he split from old-growth cedar logs found on the homestead. “Anybody else would have just torn it down and started fresh,” Trudy later said.

The orchard dates to the homestead’s founding in 1883. It holds 22 varieties of apple, among them Gravenstein, Winter Banana, Jonathan, Roxbury Russet, Winesap, and Greening. A separate block of French and English cider apples was planted later. Trudy came to the farm more than a decade after Jim. Together they pruned out suckers as thick as trunks and brought the old trees back into full bearing. She was a trained chemist and had worked for Hoodsport Winery. She began pressing apples and filled the root cellar with jugs of fermenting juice. “It was a great bartering tool,” she said. The winery’s own history dates their first cider and wine from the orchard to 1996.

From the root cellar to the first license

In 2006 the Davises made the hobby a business. An outbuilding on the farm became the winery, and its root cellar became the cellar for aging wine. Different sources describe what they were first in different ways. The farmers market profile calls Eaglemount the first winery and cidery on the Olympic Peninsula. The tasting room page calls it the first cidery on the peninsula. The winery’s farm page says it was, at the time, the only combined winery and cidery in Washington.

According to the Peninsula Daily News, the first sales were red wines in 2006, and hard ciders followed the next year. Trudy began selling cider at the Port Townsend Farmers Market in 2007. “Farmers markets were fantastic for cider,” she recalled. “So many people didn’t even know what it was at that time.” By 2010 the paper counted 400 cases each of wine and cider a year, and so far only the wine paid its own way. Jim was a former longshoreman from Longview. He designed each new building on his computer and then built it himself. Trudy ran the chemistry. The fruit went unsprayed, Jim said. A Seattle Times writer who drove the long gravel driveway that November found Jim on his tractor and the couple living in the rebuilt cedar cabin. Cider was selling fast enough by then that Trudy expected to shorten its nine-month barrel aging to keep some bottles for spring. By 2013 the Leader put output at about 3,000 gallons of cider and 600 of wine a year. A year later the farm’s buildings and water supply could no longer keep up, and the business moved to Arcadia.

Asked in 2010 why cider, Jim grinned and shrugged. “All those apples laying on the ground,” he said. “Trudy’s a real gleaner.”