Maragas Winery announced this week that they will be closing their tasting room in Bend (again) to consolidate all of their operations out at their Winery north of Terrebonne.

After attempting to run two tasting rooms with tapas food service, the split efforts became exhausting.   It was a difficult decision to completely divest ourselves of the Colorado location. Not that long ago we were resigned to having one location but hesitated and remodeled the Colorado spot as the Taverna with additional food service.

But hey, we learned quite a bit about food service that we’ll be bringing to the Winery this Spring.

And, with the planting of 18 additional acres of vines at the Winery this Spring, the consolidation became necessary now more than ever.

You may recall that this has happened before, back in August of 2010. At the time, the tasting room space didn’t sell and they ended up re-opening as the “Taverna” (as they mentioned in their announcement). I hadn’t been to the Taverna, but John Anderson loved it (this is the small building on Colorado and Bond).

Of course, the recent news that the Oregon Wine Board has officially recognized Central Oregon as a “Wine Region” will certainly help Maragas in this move as I imagine the Wine Region designation will bring in more outside wine tourism than before. But even so, being north of Terrebonne—past the Crooked River Gorge—is going to be a tough pill for locals to swallow.

In the meantime, I’ll end with the same question I asked last time: What would be a good business/what would you like to see occupy their former tasting room space? (Me, I’d go with something “beer”—no surprise there.)