In 2003, my wife Linda and I started up a new venture, making wine. Wine making has been a passion of ours, and much like flying, something I had always wanted to pursue, someday, when I had the time. We read numerous books, helped as wine slaves to other winemakers, took classes at UC Davis & Walla Walla, and did lots of wine tasting.
Fortunately, we had some very good friends in the wine business who helped us enormously to get started in the right direction, Will Gerrior & Karen Petersen of Vashon Island Winery, Bill Owen & Rob Sullivan of O/S http://www.oswinery.com, and Paul Portteus of the Portteus Vineyards www.portteus.com. We also met new friends along the way. Critically acclaimed winemakers Barb & Jim Richards of Paloma Winery in Napa http://www.palomavineyard.com/home.asp and Peter Rosback of Sineann winery, shared lots of their 'secrets' with us.
In 2004, after exhaustive taste testing, numerous times (very important in wine making is tasting!) we bottled 4 of our favorite blends to enter into the Puyallup fair. There were 500 wines entered and we took 4 second places in our divisions. At one of our wine club meetings we again bottled our Cabernet Franc and in a blind tasting, it won the best Cab Franc of the night in a field of 8 wines some valued at over $40 per bottle.
So we started out symbolically “Under the Wing” of our friends and quite figuratively “Under the Wing” of Dorothy, our J-3 Piper Cub, in our hanger!
1 ton of fruit and our first 2 – 60 gallon French oak barrels, with a borrowed homemade press (Thanks Doug!)
Most winemakers don’t have access to good high quality fruit, but we were fortunate in knowing Paul & Marty Portteus who had moved to Zillah from Vashon Island 25 years ago and started one of the first wineries in Washington State. Their vineyards are located high on the Rattlesnake hills at 1400’ elevation. Their vineyards are some of the oldest and produce the best fruit available in Washington State.
In the 2004, still 'under the wing' of our J-3 Piper cub, we doubled our efforts and made 4 barrels of wine (Cab Sauv. Cab Franc, Merlot, and Petite Sirah) Linda & I tried a few new techniques that we had learned from other wine makers we had visited over the years. Different yeasts, Cold soaking to gently extract color and softer tannins, pressing off early (2-8 brix) and finishing the primary fermentation in the barrel.
2005 We built a new facility at our home. We call it our 'Pocket Winery'. In it we can process 1000-1200 cases a year. Our first year in our brand new winery we processed 6 1/2 tons of fruit which produced 15 barrels. We also did our first bottling. This is where we developed our much loved Eclipse Blend. This continues to be one of our best sellers.
2006 We made our first white wine wines, Viognier, Riesling and Semillon, as well as the red wines. We processed 16 tons of grapes with the addition of our son Caleb, which made over 43 barrels of wine. These wines have been “in bottle” now for nearly a year. They are exceptionally rich, full bodied………….everything you want in a wine.
In 2007 we again made Viognier now called Golden Pearl and Riesling called Cloud Nine. Both are wonderful wines for which we are now locally acclaimed. As of this writing we still have the 2007 reds “in barrel”. These will soon be blended when we feel we have achieved the right blend. In 2007 we processed 22 tons of fruit. The barrels started stacking up on us and we realized we needed a bit more room. We had already lost the garage to the burgeoning onus of equipment we never knew we would need and had enclosed the back of the winery in a lean to shed. We made a critical decision at this point to purchase our own bottling line. Hand bottling would take days for the amount of wine we were now producing and Mobile Bottlers just laughed at us about coming to Vashon.
