Remy Drabkin: Trailblazing from wine to politics

Remy Drabkin has always made her own path, from being the first queer winemaker in Oregon’s Willamette Valley to being elected the first woman and queer mayor of her hometown in McMinnville after the last November 2022 elections.

But this isn’t surprising: while winemaking and politics seem to be two different and separate fields, Drabkin’s spirit of volunteerism has helped to bridge the two as she’s always been a fervent community organizer.

After learning how to make wine all over the world, Drabkin returned to McMinnville to open up Remy Wines in 2006. She then went on to co-found Wine Country Pride in 2020 for the LGBTQ community and hosted the world’s first Queer Wine Fest in 2022 to highlight queer-owned, queer-made, and queer-grown wines during the Wine Country Pride celebrations.

As a community organizer, Drabkin took up public service as a natural offshoot, being active in the city government for more than a decade. She started with consecutive appointments to the planning commission before winning two terms on the McMinnville City Council, which led her to be voted as its council president twice.

And when the city mayor resigned, Drabkin was unanimously appointed as mayor. She made it official by running for the mayor’s office last November wherein she was elected for a two-year term.

Drabkin has shown that nothing is impossible as an outspoken, queer, and Jewish woman working to ensure that representation matters in the community. Having been selected by News is Out website as one of the LGBTQ+ Changemakers last August, she said that when a person commits themselves to community involvement, “you are not only bringing yourself, you are bringing your community along with you.”

“If we want to change systems of oppression, we have to both inform those systems and participate in them,” she added.