About – A Family Winery

People

Mystic Wines was founded by owner/winemaker Rick Mafit in 1992. Rick spent the 80’s making wine in California’s Sonoma and Mendocino counties. In the 90’s Rick came north to Oregon with his young family eager to find sites where Big Reds, most notably Merlot, would thrive and make wines of distinction. After scouring the state he found The Columbia Valley AVA; a region that straddles the Columbia River. This area has a longer growing season and the heat necessary to fully ripen Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Barbera, and Zinfandel varietals.

Over the years we evolved from an exclusively wholesale winery, selling to high end restaurants and wine shops throughout the US, Canada and Japan to a Direct to Consumer winery. Today, all our wine is sold either through the tasting room in Amity Oregon or through a small number of Oregon wine shops and restaurants. Our goal is to stay small, handle the wines and winery operations ourselves and produce outstanding hand-crafted wines in limited quantities. All our wines are ready to drink upon release, yet will also benefit from additional cellaring.

All our Big Red varietals come from vineyards in the Columbia Valley AVA near The Dalles Oregon. We grow Pinot Noir, Dolcetto and Albarino right here on our estate in Amity Oregon. Our intelligently designed winery is passively cooled and heated; making our energy footprint as small and resourceful as possible. To encourage energy conservation we use a gravity flow system when bottling; where our wines gently flow from tank on the upper level to bottling line on the lower level. We also collect rainwater off of the winery roof to use for irrigation of young vines, our garden and beautiful landscape. Our rainwater collection reduces the amount of water we use from our aquifer by 10’s of thousands of gallons each year.

We are a small, proud family run business. Rick, his wife Veronika and a small staff make all the magic happen daily. Rick’s sons, now grown and on their own life courses, do come and help with harvest when they are able. Those harvests are the most fun!

Our Labels

Dillon Mafit, Rick’s eldest son, designed our original monochromatic label when he was 12 years old and was first printed on actual cork paper in 1994. The idea emulated Reserve bottlings of many small wineries in Portugal. Each label varied with the patterns created by the natural cork and the way it absorbed the sepia ink created a uniquely attractive package. This label won awards for Best Use of Art in Label Design in the 2001 San Diego National Wine Competition and again in 2002. As the cork paper became increasingly hard to procure we moved to other papers, keeping the original design that Dillon had created. This allowed a myriad of colors to be employed for our various varietals, creating a rainbow of labels to show off our wines!

Our Wines

Mystic Wines began by producing small quantities of Oregon grown Merlot in 1992. Then in 1994 Cabernet Sauvignon was added to the production line-up, in 1999 Syrah, in 2001 Zinfandel. All from vineyards in The Dalles, part of the Columbia Valley AVA. Also, in 2001 Rick secured a contract for a block of Pinot Noir from the famed Temperance Hill Vineyard located in what is now called in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. That was our first Pinot Noir in production! Then in 2002 he procured another new vineyard contract, his first vintage of Barbera! All this excitement and expansion into new wines required more space. In 2007 Rick purchased a small former cherry orchard from a good neighbor and friend and our state of the art winery was built on it in 2008. We have been growing and expanding our love of wines here in Amity ever since.

SALUTÉ!
Rick, Veronika and Crew