The first vineyard I ever visited in the Rogue Valley was Valley View Vineyard. This was 20 years ago, and at the time, there were only a handful of wineries in Southern Oregon. I remember tasting their wine in a barn on their property, at the end of a gravel road in the middle of their vineyard: it was love at first taste. They've since built a tasting room up closer to the main road, so no gravel road, and no barn, just great views of their vineyard and the surrounding mountains.
When the Wisnovskys moved to the Rogue Valley in the early 1970s, their father planted a vineyard outside the town of Ruch, naming it after the first vineyard ever planted in Oregon. Although Oregon is most known for its northern Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs, the first vineyard in the state was planted down in Jacksonville by an early pioneer, Peter Britt, back in 1852. Frank Wisnosky was himself a pioneer of Southern Oregon wines, along with the likes of Dick Troon and Dunbar Carpenter, and the wines of Valley View carry on this history.