Father and son winemakers Scott (left) and Cameron Nelson sell Résolu Wines out of their new tasting room in downtown Hillsboro. 

Hillsboro’s downtown wine scene is growing, and the local businesses that make up its backbone are banding together to make sure they all succeed.

A rising tide lifts all ships, after all. The owners of Résolu Cellars, Rue Cler Wine, DAnu Wines, and Skywater Fine Wines are counting on it.

The family-owned businesses all collaborate together, either by sharing space or planning downtown wine events to encourage more foot traffic in the three-block radius that their shops occupy in Hillsboro.

The owners say this has helped them all be successful as relatively new businesses.

“We did a progressive wine walk so everyone could have this unique experience at each wine cellar,” said Kathie Nelson of Résolu Cellars. “It was a big success.”

Attendees signed up in advance and were directed to one of three starting points — Résolu, DAnu, and Skywater Fine Wines. Each featured wine education events and tastings before sending folks on to the next stop.

It was such a smash success that the businesses plan to do more wine walks in the future.

“It was sort of a guided tour,” said Neil Thompson of Skywater Fine Wines. “We made it educational, fun and encouraged them to walk around a three-block radius.”

Another wine walk was held this week in conjunction with Hillsboro’s Art Walk, with even more participating businesses, like Bag&Baggage Productions featuring Helvetia Vineyards & Winery products during a tasting event at The Vault Theater on East Main Street.

Résolu Cellars & Rue Cler Wine

Résolu, which moved into its new tasting room at 262 S.E. Fourth Ave. last year, features a family winemaking operation that provides local wines.

They use the space not just as a tasting room, but as a place to stage and accomplish all the steps that go into the winemaking process — like juicing grapes, fermenting the wine, and barreling and bottling their products.

Scott Nelson, who began making wines in the mid-2000s and has been growing his operations ever since, said the space has given him the stability he was looking for.

He first started making wines out of a 100-square-foot shed on his suburban Washington County property, so the proper storefront and production center is a huge step up.

“We moved in here in February 2022, when it was still under construction,” he said. “There’s still a lot we envision doing with this space.”

He makes the wines alongside his son, Cameron Nelson, who says he “caught the wine bug” from his dad and decided to help grow the family business when he finished his tour in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps.

It’s such a family operation that even Cameron Nelson’s son helps with gathering the grapes from vineyards the family buys from, and with the production days at the tasting room.

Kathie Nelson, Scott’s wife, handles the events planning and does a lot of the collaboration with other local wineries and bottle shops.

“We’ve grown collaboratively because we didn’t have a tasting room,” Kathie said. “We wanted to lean into that and figure out how we can collaborate.”

Rue Cler Wine, another business owned and operated by a married couple, also uses the same building for its own wine production.

“They were in growth mode and were in growth mode,” Kathie said. “We knew we wanted to grow into a new space.”

Angela Price with Rue Cler Wine, which does business out of the Winery on 4th, as their new sign says, called their business partnership destined to happen.

“We met Scott and Kathie in 2019 after a wine event,” Price said. “They us told that, ‘We’re in our garage and would like to expand.’ … We just kind of had that similar interest. We kept talking and it evolved into, ‘What do you think about having a partnership and sharing a space?’”

“We loved how Scott and Kathie had this vision of (a) space where we could feature other small winemakers,” she added.

They plan to host five other small businesses at the shop during a spring pop-up market on May 7, for example.

Rue Cler produces far less wine each year than Résolu, but Price thinks the move to having a proper space — no more buckets of fermentation going on in their bathtub — to produce wines should help them grow their own capacity.

Résolu’s space, purchased by White Birch Design Company, is the former Hillsboro Auto Speedy Glass shop, and the building has come to feature other ties to local history as its been built out. The bar itself is an old bowling lane from the former Milwaukie Bowl, placed atop old beams from a deconstructed train depot.

“It fits with our style of reuse, reclaim and be kind to Mother Earth,” Scott Nelson said.

Skywater Fine Wines

Just down the street from Résolu is Skywater Wines, which opened in June 2022 and features more European specialty wines than the more strictly local wineries. Thompson, Skywater’s owner, says part of the reason wine makers and sellers can all collaborate is because each one does something a little different.

His storefront is just a bottle shop, not a tasting room or winemaking space like at Résolu. He also seeks out rarer wines that aren’t produced in the Pacific Northwest.

“I’m just a retail shop but I have scheduled special events,” Thompson said. “It’s really nice that we all kind of do our own thing. Because of our differences, it’s made it really comfortable to all collaborate as much as we can.”

“We’re going for different clients, but all those clients love wine,” he added. “So that’s why we’re so into doing all those different things with them.”

He said all the local business owners like to hang out at each other’s spaces and talk wine while planning future events like more wine walks.

He also said he loves being in a prime location at 384 E. Main St. during a period of more locally owned businesses moving into downtown Hillsboro.

“We love being on Main Street at the beginning of a new wave of growth,” Thompson said.

DAnu Wines

Anchoring Hillsboro’s wine scene alongside all these newcomers is DAnu Wines, which opened at 173 N.E. Third Ave. about five years ago. It’s a proper wine bar, serving food and featuring a larger space to accommodate live music and other events.

Maxine Williams, who owns the business with her vintner husband, Joe Williams, said that they saw the emergence of these new businesses as an opportunity.

“With Résolu and Skywater joining in, we just started to realize we can encourage more people to come to downtown Hillsboro to really experience the downtown and even experience the wine offerings,” she said.

Maxine Williams and the Nelsons at Résolu said that while they can make similar wines to one another, real wine aficionados know that the flavors and makeup of a wine can vary greatly, even if using grapes from the same areas of the world.

“We do over 15 types of wine,” Williams said. “But that’s the thing about small craft wines is you can do two of the same type of wine that has two distinct flavors. It’s like art — no two are alike.”

Scott Nelson echoed this same thought, saying there’s more that goes into the process than just where the grapes come from. Wine is also affected by the barreling, the fermentation, and other steps along the way.

“It’s less about winemaking and more about nurturing the wine,” he said, while standing in the barrel room of his storefront, housing 50-some barrels branded with the Résolu name.

He also commented on how far his business has come from the early days when he first set out to learn winemaking.

“There’s something about when you get your first barrel with your name on it,” Scott Nelson said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we’re important now.’”