The Fizz #62: McMinnville Mayor and winemaker Remy Drabkin is building LGBTQ+ community in a forward moving Oregon city
In this issue, Mayor Drabkin and I tackle her work around climate change, housing, sustainability, and LBGTQ+ community in her native city of McMinnville.
For the 62nd issue of The Fizz, I had the great pleasure of speaking to Remy Drabkin, Mayor of the city of McMinnville, Oregon and winemaker at Remy Wines. Remy was recently honored by Wine Enthusiast’s 40 under of 40 list, and is an incredibly inspirational figure in the wine industry. A dedicated organizer for the LGBTQ+ community, Remy co-founded Wine Country Pride and Queer Wine Fest, creating important events for the queer community in Oregon and beyond.
In this issue, we speak in depth about the political aspect of Remy’s life—her position in public service, and the issues that matter to her. We spoke about how climate change impacts her community, her focus on housing as tourism grows, as well as the importance of LGBTQ+ focused events in her area, and how they have brought connection to the people of McMinnville. I am so excited about the dedicated work of this passionate winemaker and policy-maker, and can’t wait to follow her future endeavors.
Margot: I would love to hear a little bit about your upbringing. Was wine a part of your life growing up?
Remy: Yeah, I was raised in an Italian restaurant and a Jewish household, so yes! I was raised with wine as part of meals and celebrations and ceremonies. It was never something that was restricted. Our friends all made wine, we were always playing in the cellar. So yeah, I've been around wine literally my entire life.
Margot: You grew up in McMinnville—how has that area changed since your childhood?
Remy: When I was growing up here, it was a town of 8,000 and now we're over 35,000 and growing with a growth population of 41,000 in the next couple years. That alone is tremendous. When I was growing up the wine industry, there were about ten families making wine in the Willamette Valley. Now we're over seven hundred. We've grown and changed as the city tremendously, and the wine industry has grown up at very much the same time. The wine industry has had a lot of impact on how McMinnville has formed and making it a culinary and drinks destination.
Margot: How has the culture changed at all around wine or the industry?
Remy: You know, the industry was just very small. There's this great picture—have you ever seen the Harlem Jazz photograph that has all these incredible jazz musicians? They hung it on the wall in the restaurant I grew up in, so I'm familiar with it. They emulated this photograph—with the wine industry in front of Nick's Italian Cafe and you could get everybody in a picture. Everybody really, you could get all these principles in the industry in the picture.
Right now, when we get off the phone, I'm gonna walk across the street to Nectar Graphics, they’re the design firm that does label design for tons of wineries. Why am I bringing that up? Because it's not just that the wine industry that has been impacted, the industry around us has also been impacted. There was not a design firm that I could walk to down the street when I was a kid. Linfield, now Linfield University, has a dedicated wine program. I was on the founding board of the Linfield Center for Northwest Studies, which has now become their wine institute.
Chemeketa Community College has a campus in McMinville and they have a viticulture and enology program. Those didn't exist. We have nonprofits that are now focused on making improvements within the wine industry, bringing equity to the wine industry, like Ahivoy. It has heavily impacted tourism to our area.
A number of years ago at council, we implemented what's called a transient lodging tax, which is basically a room tax. Somebody comes here to stay in a hotel, they pay a room tax. Now we didn't really have a lot of hotels. We had a couple chain hotels. Best Western and Red Lion, things like that. We'd started to have some vacation rentals and we implemented this tax. The way that it works is a certain percentage goes to a city general fund, but the other percentage, and this is mandated by state, has to go to promotion of tourism.
The first year we gave away grants to existing events that were drawing folks to the area, and then we decided to set up what's called the DMO. And that stands for two different things. It either stands for a Destination Marketing Organization or a Destination Management Organization. What we started initially was a Destination Marketing Organization that was focused on getting people to drive out to wine country, past Dundee.
We started this group, Visit McMinville. They've done an incredible job. Tourism has built tremendously. We have new hotels. Now tributary hotels just opened and I hear room rates are $800 to $1200 a night. There’s been a massive impact from tourism. It's attracting investors, and there are ripple effects to all of that. Our DMO decided they would change their focus and become a Destination Management Organization. A destination management organization is saying, we have this great spot here tourists want to come visit. It's so important that the work we do is also making this a great place to live for our local community. Now that's the kind of work that we're doing.
Margot: That’s really interesting and very thoughtful and timely. How have short term rentals like Airbnbs played into that work?
Remy: We currently have a moratorium on short term vacation rentals. The data doesn't actually show that there're a problem in our area, but there's data and then there's reality. Even though we don't have a large number of them, people want to put them in and around our downtown core, and that impacts the neighborhoods in and around our downtown core. It's something that comes up all the time. A lot of the work I do is on housing—I can't even tell you how many times our ordinances around short term vacation rentals have gone before the planning commission. In the time that I've been in public service, this is probably the fourth.
Cities can do a variety of things. You could have zero regulations, or you could just not allow them. If you limit them, you say no short term vacation rentals, then people that get upset about private property rights are going to say how can you tell me what I can do with my property? If you don't have any regulations, you risk getting your neighborhoods ghosted and tremendous loss of housing, and people going in and buying up affordable housing in order to flip it.
I think our planning commission hearing on short term vacation rentals is next week. Tune into Public Access Channel 11.
Margot: It’s definitely a complicated problem, I’d love to see where you end up on it! As more tourism comes to the area, are you seeing more restaurants or wine bars pop up?
Remy: We've always had a really robust culinary scene. It's not that the DMO necessarily brought the tourism to McMinnville, and now restaurants are popping up. It's that we had this incredible culinary and wine scene, and just nobody knew about it. We have new restaurants, we've had restaurants change hands over the last couple years.
Nick's Italian Cafe put McMinnville on the gastro map. Here, you don't even have to say it's farm to table. It's almost a norm. That's not all of our restaurants, of course, but that focus has always been there. We're in an agricultural area, so we're surrounded by farms and chefs here have known that and been using those products for a long time. I don't know if this is still true, but for Nick’s, 95% of everything in their dishes came from within forty five miles. We have a new restaurant that just opened up and they purchased an existing farm, growing all their food. That’s not uncommon here—I'm a mile away from the farm that raises my meat and I live in town.
Margot: You mentioned you're mainly in an agricultural community. As you've served in public service, are there initiatives that you've worked on or are working on now that affect folks in the wine industry?
Remy: I spent a year serving as a Director on the Oregon Wine Board. What I work on in my public service, though, and what I work on in the wine industry are not necessarily the same. McMinnville is the heart of the Oregon wine industry. However, it's not as though there are actually that many wineries inside the city limits. As my role as mayor, I work regionally, but my focus is on what happens inside our city limits.
Within the wine industry and the work that I've done there, I focus on sustainability and equity. I have a non-profit called Wine Country Pride. We do a lot of local education and outreach. We put books into all of our public schools and libraries that are either queer authored or feature queer characters. We do that every year. We have scholarships that go out to every high school in the area. We put on a lot of free events for all ages, with programming in Spanish, ASL, and English. We host free queer meetups for parents, students, people that play sports, everyone. We do free flag distribution in our area. Free progress Pride or Black Lives Matter flags to any farm, church, or business.
I've lived here the majority of my life. I can tell you, almost my whole life here, I never saw a Pride flag. There was never a Pride celebration. If you come to downtown McMinnville during the month of Pride today, 90% of the businesses downtown are flying Pride flags. Flying the flags isn't the end of the end of the work that needs to be done, though. Work on a DEI statement, but a DEI statement isn't the end of the work that needs to be done. Yes, do DEI training and then do it again, and then do it again, and now keep doing it and make it mandatory and pay your employees to do it.
One of the initiatives we do through Wine Country Pride is called Rainbow Quest. That's a mostly food and drinks, and also retail initiative. Different companies dedicate a dollar from a product sold. We communicate with those businesses, these are our standards and practices. Part of participating in this initiative and flying this flag and putting up these things also means that you're creating a safe space for queer people.
Please remember, queer people are all people. Queer people are Black and white. Queer people are every ethnicity and every nationality and every religion and every income level and age and gender and level of ability. That visual messaging impacts our community. I've heard from so many people that have never been here before that feel safe in McMinnville.
Margot: It sounds like you’re really meaningfully committed to that work. You recently put together the first Queer Wine Fest. Why was this an important event to put on for you?
Remy: I started Wine Country Pride with a couple of friends, and the first couple of years we did it at my vineyard tasting room lawn area. We grew the event, it was time to move it, make it truly a big robust public event, which we really did this year.
I was terrified to be out in wine. For years I was terrified to be out in wine, and I closeted myself. Not intentionally but, you know, I met a winemaker for dinner once, who said didn't you have a dog when we were visiting you? Who's watching your dog? I said oh, you know, my friend.
Then I hired this queer tasting room manager, and he started outing me to everybody. I was like, why are you doing that? I'd been out here since I was sixteen so, people knew I was out, but not people walking into my tasting room. I'd still get a lot of questions about oh does your husband make the wine? Is Remy your father? You know, just all that kind of stuff. He started outing me to everybody and said no—people love it. He was like, nobody cares. They actually love to know something about you. It really pushed me.
I first started fundraising for Cascade AIDS Project. When I did that, it was a step toward being out in business. Not in the way of just my tasting room manager outing me, but by having the business take a lead on doing an open to the public fundraising event that was specifically for a queer nonprofit. We did that for a number of years and I think I eased in a little bit. Then I was invited to be in this movie called Red, White, and Black. I was one of two queer folks in it. It really obviously made me even more out in business.
That’s when I thought, we have to bring Pride out here. We start Wine Country Pride, do it for a couple years. We take it to the streets. In February, we decide Pride 2022 is going to be in McMinnville, open to the public. Then I thought what am I going to do at Remy Wines this year to continue to celebrate Pride and not compete with my own events with my nonprofit? Are there even any queer wine festivals? Has this ever been done before? We just started Googling like crazy and thought—that’s it, we’re doing it. We're going to do the world's first queer wine festival.
Queer Wine Fest is very wine industry focused. There were fifteen wineries, people couldn’t believe it. One winemaker came up to me afterward and said that's the first time some people were coming to taste with me because they were just coming to taste with me. Not because they were like, oh look at that queer person over there, we should go try their wines. Not everybody that attended the event was queer. My mom's not queer—she has a queer sister, a queer brother-in-law, a queer daughter, a queer son, a queer granddaughter. Not everybody there was queer, but they were entrenched in queer culture. It was incredible.
Margot: That sounds amazing. I’ll absolutely be there next year. You had fifteen winemakers there?
Remy: We did. Our qualifiers were you either had to be queer owned, a queer winemaker, or queer winegrower. Usually with these tastings, you submit your wines and the selection committee selects. We had a lot of conversation about that and people's biases, and how they were going to even perceive a queer wine fest. Would people be questioning the quality of the wines? We had that conversation multiple times and I think the answer is yes. I think when people first started hearing about it, there was a degree of oh I wonder how good those wines will be. We talked about those biases coming up and how we were going to deal with them and how we were also going to deal with the exclusivity that comes with the wine industry.
Instead of submitting wines for a tasting panel, we said that we wanted to offer a diversity of wines at this event. We don’t want to see sixteen Aligotes, for example. The goal was to show off these wines. Submit a list of the wines you are most proud of, not the wines themselves, so that we can put together a nice selection—six white wines and six red wines and two sparkling wines. That worked out great.
We did have some people decide not to participate after expressing interest because they weren't ready to be out in wine yet. We had the more established wineries. We also had a very established winery that nobody associated with the queer community. We had somebody use it as a coming out—that was tremendous.
Margot: Wow, that's so meaningful, and sounds like a blast! Why do you think that is so difficult for queer people, queer winemakers, to be out in the industry? I know a couple of people who are queer, who make wine, who are not out, and I'm sure you do as well. Why do you think that is?
Remy: I think it's fear based and then, as you know, it's exhausting to have to come out all the time. I think it’s easier, in a way. One of the great things that's come out of Wine Country Pride was that I've been invited to participate in the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum, which has representation from non-profits all over that are specifically doing equity work in wine. All of those nonprofits that participate in that forum, they're focusing on different subsections of the industry, because we're an industry that needs reform. Maybe the answers in the question.
We're largely agricultural, industry wise. Most everybody is rural, which typically means that you have a mix of political views. My long term thinking with Wine Country Pride is to create the kind of infrastructure that you could pick up and put down anywhere.
Margot: You’re saying, the more types of queer friendly events, the more of a queer friendly community you'll develop, the easier it will be for people who end up making wine in those areas to come out.
Remy: Yes. Events like Queer Wine Fest, events like Co-Ferment that was just put on in Napa [Co-Fermented Instagram here], those events give us the opportunity to come together. We're doing another equity event in November in Portland. It's called Taste for Equity, and it's a food and beverage event that focuses on our historically underrepresented community.
Margot: Awesome. You’re in the process of building a new winery now. As you were thinking out that space, what were some of the must haves that you planned?
Remy: Well, the bathroom! I'm joking, but I'm not because my bathroom's very intentional. My bathroom is a hundred percent ADA accessible. Every stall and every sink is ADA accessible. It's one bathroom for all people and it has an exterior entrance near the vineyard as well, so we could get rid of port-a-potties for folks working in the vineyard.
I'm on a thirty acre parcel, but we only farm seven acres, and we wanted to take away as many barriers as possible and improve health and safety standards for everybody participating in making our wines, which of course includes our vineyard stewards. It's an adaptive reuse project and we reused like you can't believe. For example, we found this metal grating and took it over to a local high school welding class and they chopped it up and made stairs out of it for us.
Sustainability was really important to me. Trying to reduce our overall impact, but also sustainability in terms of health and safety standards, so workplace safety. We put in some simple infrastructure for personal safety, but also equipment safety. We put this exterior utility cage in, which is very simple, but we did it so all of our gases would hook up to a manifold so that you're never walking around the facility carrying a tank of gas, which is hard on your back, and it's dangerous. All you do is walk around with your hose end, and I've got utility stations throughout the winery, so you can plug into nitrogen or CO2 or compressed air.
Margot: What are some of the unique issues that winemakers in your area face, and how is politics getting involved to help those folks?
Remy: Well, I don't think it's unique, but I don't know what could be hitting us harder than climate change, because that embodies all these different things that impact our industry. The wildfires—you probably can't tell, but it's hazy here today. There are fires in Northeastern Oregon and Idaho right now. We've got big winds, which are unusual for the area, and that's bringing smoke. The smoke is from hundreds of miles away. Our workforce, health and safety standards, availability of workforce, that’s all impacted.
Then—how do we use water? How are we good stewards of our water system? Typically, it can take up to six gallons of water to make a gallon a wine. So how do we get better? How do we use less, do less, be more circular? And how is politics involved?
In the creation of my new winery, we invented a new concrete formula that sequesters carbon emissions. Concrete is the largest polluter from the industry. It's responsible for 7% of all the world's CO2 emissions. My concrete slab sequestered five tons of CO2. My winery build project also ended up being an incubator for an entirely new business that now sells this carbon negative concrete that we invented. It's not my business. I have no financial interest in it, but I have a great interest in moving the needle on climate change.
You see that's pretty new concrete right there [points to a concrete parking lot]. These are newer light fixtures. This street was part of an improvement that happened a number of years ago. Concrete's a huge part of our infrastructure. You see it everywhere. On the politics side, my big concept is that we change our design codes to demand carbon neutral products in these types of infrastructure projects that are going forward. You put that into your design standards. Then you can still go out for your regular request-for-proposals, so you're not cutting anybody out.
We can still say, hey, we need this new corner concrete, and we put out our RFQ and every concrete person in here can still bid on it, but the bid has to include that the concrete they pour will be carbon neutral. The formula that we came up with from the beginning was always that it would be open source.
There are also bottle bills that have been moving through Oregon. There's so many opportunities for how the wine industry and politics can cross over and make a positive stab at what's happening with the environment. Could we say that what Oregon needs is a bottle recycling plant where all of our wine bottles go and get sorted by color and get melted down and made into new wine bottles. That could go out to all of the wineries that are right here. That type of innovation is fully accessible, especially when you look at the changes of the wine industry. There's major investment happening in the Oregon wine industry—A to Z was just bought. With those large investments come large investments into research dollars.
At the regional level, we’re talking about how do we access federal funds to do better for our communities. That was the meeting I just came out of—about bringing a new Ag technology to McMinnville that would help us create closed loop systems. I think the wine industry as a whole has to look at closed loop systems with our winery build projects.
This Sunday, I'm doing a walk on the properties. I'm starting to master plan my property. One of the things I've already done is had people out to walk with me from Portland State, looking at how we can do collaborative water use projects on our hill. Even with my water use pond, one of the things I am going to evaluate is are there going to be instances where we might have overflows or should we intentionally build in overflows so that we could have a turbine at the bottom of that overflow, so that we are creating our own electricity that way. People are successfully off the grid here.
Margot: It sounds like there’s so much opportunity in the industry right now to grow in a more sustainable way. I can’t wait to see all that you do in McMinnville, and at Remy Wines. Thanks for your time, mayor!
You can support Mayor Remy Drabkin by buying her wines, signing up for her wine club, and following her on Instagram.
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