NEWBERG, Ore. — About an hour and a half into the new Warner Bros. Pictures film, “Practical Magic 2,” Sally Owens, played by Sandra Bullock, sits down to dessert with Dr. Ian Price, played by Lee Pace. After scooping a slice of apple pie onto each plate, Price tops each slice with a warm custard and then uncorks a bottle of wine sitting between them, filling each glass half full with red wine.
The wine on the table? An 2021 Estate Pinot Noir, straight from Newberg’s Balsall Creek in the Chehalem Mountains.
Community-supported journalism
This article was made possible by the generous support of Newsberg readers and advertisers. Independent local news takes real resources to produce. If Newsberg is valuable to you, please consider joining us — for as little as $1 a month, or with a one-time gift in any amount.
“I saw Practical Magic 2 in theaters with a couple of friends, sat in the front row, and we started screaming our excitement when Balsall Creek showed up throughout the entire custard scene,” said Emily Yensen, the winery’s director of marketing and sales, in an email. “And not just as a bottle in the background, as an actual wine prop, being poured and consumed by two huge name actors! Based on our experience thus far with product placement, this was a home run; we could not be happier!”
“Practical Magic 2,” released Sept. 10, is the sequel to “Practical Magic,” released in 1998. According to the film review website RogerEbert.com, “Practical Magic” is inspired by Alice Hoffman’s novel of the same name, released in 1995. The original film also starred Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as Sally and Gillian Owens, respectively, two cursed witches who bring tragedy to anyone they fall in love with.
The placement came after a product placement agency contacted the winery in early 2025, Yensen said. The agency was looking for a small-production wine brand to send to television and movie sets, and the winery was “decently skeptical” about what it would produce. The winery sent wine to quite a few sets, most in Los Angeles and a few abroad, including “Practical Magic 2.”
A handful of sets never used the wine, and some scenes were cut, Yensen said. The winery’s brand did appear in Season 2 of “Nobody Wants This,” a romantic comedy series starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, but it was one of more than 10 brands in a shot so quick that its name could not be read even when paused.
A more prominent placement during a peak moment in the movie has already yielded some results for the Newberg winery.
“We have definitely already noticed an uptick in follows,” Yensen said, “and we’re looking at ways to pull the placement further into some experiences both in the short term, and potentially annually as a season of the witch special.”
She also pointed to a few coincidences. The winery’s name draws on Balsall Common, a village in the United Kingdom where the family of founders Jon and Lesli Owens lived in the 1990s and befriended a family that ran a 100-year-old Alsatian winery. The scene in which the wine is poured is set in a small U.K. village less than an hour and a half from where the family lived.
The Owens name is another link. According to RogerEbert.com, sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, played again by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, face a dark curse threatening their family. Yensen described the movie as being about the Owens family tracing its lineage back hundreds of years. Balsall Creek is owned and operated by Jon and Lesli Owens; their daughter, Emily Yensen, née Owens; her husband, Zac Yensen; and their son, James Owens.
“I know first-hand a thing or two about being an Owens sister,” Emily Yensen said.
