Our Story

Winery Profile

WildAire Cellars was started in 2005 and is the shared dream of the husband and wife team of Matt and Jean Driscoll of McMinnville, Oregon. WildAire Cellars is a small, virtual winery located in Illahe Vineyards' winery facility in Dallas, Oregon and we produce ultra-premium wines for an affordable price.

In our first year of production we made approximately 70 cases of wine and we hope to increase that to about 2500 in the next few years. Our winemaking philosophy is to start with beautiful fruit from some of Oregon's premier vineyards and then gently guide the grapes through the fermentation. Our small size lets us pay careful attention to every detail of the winemaking process. We constantly taste and evaluate the wines during their lifespan to ensure that the wine is absolutely the best that we can make. We age all of our wines in French Oak barrels and about twenty to fifty percent of them are new oak.

The Story

What started out as a vacation to attend a wedding in Amity, Oregon began a dream to start a wine business to make world-class Pinot Noir. After many days of wine tasting and touring around the Willamette Valley, Matt and Jean Driscoll decided that this dream was what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Craft beautiful Pinots out west, and then bring that luscious wine back east for their friends and family to enjoy.

In 2000, Matt and Jean got married and decided to take a chance and move from Virginia to Oregon in their quest for Pinot. Jean found a job through the Internet, and they moved out in 2001. Matt spent his time learning the craft from some of the best wineries in the valley and supplementing that knowledge at the Northwest Viticulture Center in Salem.

In 2005, they sold their house in Salem and moved to McMinnville to form a wine company, making Pinot Noir as a "virtual" winery. They didn't have the resources to acquire the equipment or a facility on their own, so the best option was to find a winery that had the capability to bring in smaller tenant wineries to their facility. They have since found a home at a brand new state of the art winery at Illahe Vineyards in Dallas, Oregon.

The name "WildAire" comes from the name of Matt’s mother's estate in Roanoke, VA. She found the name carved into a granite fireplace mantle in a long since forgotten remains of a house on McAffee's Knob near Roanoke. The house was used as a base by Rangers on the Appalachian Trail and has since burned to the ground, leaving nothing but the fireplace standing. She liked the name so much that she decided to name her estate after it. She wanted Matt and Jean to use the name for their new wine business and when she recently passed away, they thought it would be a fitting tribute to her memory to call it "WildAire Cellars".

Their mother’s influence on the business name is only part of what she contributed to the company. She also painted the watercolor painting that was used as the background image on the front of every Pinot Noir bottle that’s made by WildAire Cellars.