About your Guide: H. BRUCE SMITH




I've been in the wine industry for 21 years. My first wine job was pouring wine at Raymond Burr Vineyards, in Dry Creek Valley AVA, just outside Healdsburg, California in Sonoma County.

My Passion for wine began long before then. Back in my Undergrad years I was just discovering that wine was more than I was lead to believe. For starters different grapes produced different tasting wines. My Prof suggested that I try a Gamay Beaujolais to get my feet wet in the Reds. I haven't turned back since then and cotinue to explore the varitals of fine wine.

In 1992 I made my first voyage to France. I feel in love with the people, wines, and countryside of France. I returned each of the following 10 years, many of those years I also conducted bike tours of Brittany, around my home base in the Breton countryside. My Splash Wine Tours feature 3 days of cycling as one of the best ways to acclimate to the county.


After pouring wine at a variety of wineries in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, my wine voyage took me to the Umpqua Valley AVA of Southern Oregon, outside Roseburg, Oregon. Here I started Oregon Wine Country Tours with the purchase of a 14-passanger van. From 2007-2013 I ran wine tours of the local wineries.


In 2013 I moved my tours back to Sonoma County and operated up Dry Creek Vally Wine Tours for three years, having had the pleasure of exposing hundreds of clients to the amazing wine of Dry Creek.

Next I returned to the Southern Oregon wine region including the Applegate Valley AVA, a sub-AVA of the Rogue Valley AVA. I continued taking my clients out to the vineyards scattered over the region.

My next stop was Bend, Oregon, while not known for its wine but rather its beer, I offered walking wine tours of the city's tastings rooms. In 2019 a conducted a wine tour to the Rhone Valley in France with a group from Bend.

Currently I am living in Sonoma County, California.