The Thing About Vineyards

On a challenge, we headed out into the dirt to talk to the guys who grow some of the best fruit in the world.

By Doug Haugen

“Wine is made in the vineyard.” This is a common adage in the wine world, perhaps trite, maybe cliché, but probably one of the most succinct ways of communicating the importance of the virgin fruit in the overall lifecycle of wine. Another way to phrase it is, “You can make bad wine out of good grapes, but you can’t make good wine out of bad grapes.” The phrase is ubiquitous among winemakers, viticulturists and professional tasters. No doubt you’ve heard it in tasting rooms or wine parties.

Here’s why: Winemaking is a much more complicated process than just leaving a pitcher of Welch’s in the fridge for too long. Nearly every stage of it is an effort to bring aspects of the fruit out in some way. The acids, tannins, sugar and alcohol, let alone all of the nuanced flavors that can be drawn out and expressed, all of these things are only there but by the grace of the grape.

For example, just achieving desired alcohol levels in a wine requires specific levels of sugar in the grapes from which the wine is made (yeast converts sugar into alcohol through organic metabolic processes). That sugar is a product of photosynthesis in the grape vines, and so the amount of sunlight the vines get is very important. Temperatures also affect the vine’s ability to function, and water availability can determine whether a vine channels its energy into vine growth or fruit production. The amount of fruit allowed to grow also has an impact on how much effort the plant puts into the remaining fruit, affecting the sugar levels in all of it. And all of that is just to get the sugar for alcohol, not to mention the vast array of flavors derived from the soil, the health of the vine, the problem of pests, etc. Make no mistake—growing vinifera grapes is as exact a science as they come outside of a vacuum tube.

So, why do you hear so little about the vineyard managers? In the Oz of the wine industry, the vineyard manager just may be the man behind the curtain. This month, we drove around the state to talk to some of the folks that make it all happen.

Denis Gayte
Elephant Mountain Vineyards

After getting lost, making a few phone calls and getting some directions, we found ourselves amid expansive vineyards, still mostly barren to the untrained eye, on a windy, cloudy day. As we stood there marveling at the eerie quietness of the countryside, Denis Gayte came driving up the gravel road in his big white pickup, just like you would expect from any farmer. Gayte is the young, energetic vineyard manager for Elephant Mountain Vineyards, but while his domain is deep in Washington dirt, he has a unique background on foreign soil.

After graduating from Washington State University, he headed over to France to study viticulture and enology. Because his father was French and he had a gaggle of relatives still living in France, he was able to gain residency there and start schooling in the wine business. He eventually achieved the official designation of “Young Winegrower,” a post recognized by the French government, and started his career. In 2001 and 2002, he helped start a winery and some vineyards. He bought abandoned vineyards and leased them out. He then took over an abandoned winery and bought land to grow grapes on. His time in France saw his experience run the gamut from ground to glass.

In 2008, he sold his properties in France. Back in the States, he had a choice about whether to head down the road of wine-making or wine-growing. “I’m a winemaker as well,” he said, “but I’ve always had a passion for the growing.” He took up with Elephant Mountain Vineyards. “I think we’re on the good side of it,” he said, “It’s a bit more noble, I think, what we’re doing here.”

Gayte spoke about the complexity of wine grape growing. They were in the middle of buffering the soil with treated irrigation water to correct a pH balance that would impact the acidity of the fruit, and thus, the structure of the finished wine. You never know what will happen from year to year. “It’s a crap shoot. In the end, it’s a crap shoot,” Gayte said. A good viticulturalist must roll with the punches and adjust his methods to consistently produce quality grapes every time. And from the looks of it, that’s just what he’s done.

Patrick Dineen
Dineen Family Vineyards

There are some who have grown up with boots on the ground and dirt under their fingernails. There are others that are still more comfortable letting those guys take care of things.

Patrick Dineen decided he wanted to get into the wine business when he retired from a successful career in the banking industry in 2001. Having spent his youth on a dairy farm, and after developing a passion for wine as a consumer over the years, he decided to bring the wine and farming life together in the form of vineyards.

“I have a long interest in wine as a consumer. In part of my banking career, we did a lot of agricultural processing and financing, so I knew the processing side of it, but I did not know the growing side. But, our interest has become more in the growing and viticulture. When you have a passion, you gotta do something, right?”

He looked around in California for property, but discovered that it was far too expensive for what he had in mind. He then looked in Walla Walla, but he decided that he still wanted to live primarily in the Seattle area, so he looked a bit closer. That’s when he found his spot in Zillah, just along the border of Rattlesnake Hills AVA.

He made a small investment into Sheridan Winery in 2000, after which he bought a ten acre plot next to Sheridan and Andrew Will Vineyards in 2001 and started planting. Lastly, the property where his winery’s beautiful tasting room (and second home) now stands became available, and he planted grapes there, too. Now, he has a total of ninety acres, sixtyfive of which are planted.

However, Pat Dineen wants to enjoy his retirement years, and has no interest in taking over the daily operations of the vineyards. For that, he has Patrick Rawn, who also manages other vineyards around Zillah, and who owns Two Mountain Winery with his brother Matt.

“I’m happy with just the way it’s working now,” he said, “I’m here a lot working with Pat, but I let Pat run the crew. I am retired, so I’m not interested in a hands-on job, but I do decide what we want to plant, and I do all the sales work with the other wineries. I do the supplies ordering to make sure we’re getting a good value” and other business-end functions.

Pat Rawn works very closely with the wineries who buy the grapes, grooming the grapes to their specifications, though there are many that merely want to be called when the grapes are ready, and Rawn schedules the harvest. “I try to stay out of that,” Dineen said, “because when you get too many guys involved with the scheduling, it doesn’t work.”

It seems to work well with Dineen running the business end of things while expert viticulturalists like the Rawns can ensure the quality fruit. It just goes to show that there’s room in the business for everyone.

Richard Boushey
Boushey Vineyards

After getting lost again and making a couple of phone calls, we arrived at the home of Dick Boushey, the founder and namesake of Boushey Vineyards. His house rests in the middle of vineyards as far as the eye can see, which includes the hillsides of other AVAs in the greater Yakima Valley appellation.

Dick Boushey planted his first grapes in the Yakima Valley back in 1980. While he was raised around agriculture, it was a stroke of destiny that shoved him headlong into the wine world. He was studying to be a banker, but “joining this bank thing was like joining the army,” he said, and it would require him to move around, making next to no money in the hopes of someday doing all right for himself. The idea became very unattractive, so he decided to join family in the Yakima Valley area in the agrarian life of tending orchards. Eventually, he planted some grapes, and everything changed. “I lucked out here, I guess. Sort of stumbled into the wine thing, but [over time] I’ve sort of purposely bought these other little sites. I kind of bought these little plots that are good for wine grapes,” which make up what is now Boushey Vineyards, one of the more coveted sources of vinifera grapes in Washington.

Boushey is a laid back, earnest man who has spent the last thirty years unintentionally building an empire. “All these years figuring it out. It’s taken me thirty years and I haven’t figured it out.” His training has been hands on, experimenting, learning from those around him. The WSU research center has been an invaluable resource, and so have the winemakers. “The key to being a great grower is putting up with great winemakers,” he said with a good-natured laugh, “You get feedback, that’s where you really learn.”

What has thirty years in the industry taught him? “Terroir is the final answer, everything being equal, but nothing’s ever equal. Every grower does something different all the time, and it’s the timing of when they do it,” he said, “You’ve got to stay in touch with your wines… It’s like playing an instrument. You’ve got to master the thing before you can really make it sound good. You’ve got to know how to manage your water, the crop load and the nutrients in your soil.”

And while Boushey says that he has never met a wine he wouldn’t drink, he has a down-to-earth attitude about it, surprising considering the quality wines being made from his grapes. “That’s all you need in wine, don’t be intimidated by it, just enjoy it; and the more you learn about it the more enjoyable it becomes. You don’t want to get rid of all the mystery, but you get rid of some of it. And, you can analyze it better on your own; you don’t need somebody to tell you what’s good or bad.” Sage advice.

Jim Holmes
Ciel du Cheval

We got lost again, passing right by our destination, and after receiving a call from Jim Holmes to tell us we had driven right by him, we found our way back to the Ciel du Cheval vineyards on Red Mountain. There, Jim Holmes stood waiting patiently for us, looking right at home among the surrounding acreage crawling with vines.

Holmes, along with John Williams of Kiona Vineyards and Winery, bought some land on Red Mountain as an investment property back in 1975. Later, after reading some studies by Walter Clore, they became the first to plan grapes on the hill. Parting ways amicably years later, Holmes started his own Red Mountain vineyard nearby, calling it Ciel du Cheval.

Holmes is both warm and matter-of-fact. Currently, he controls about 160 acres of vineyards—120 acres of Ciel, and two twenty-acre plots that are partnerships with Quilceda Creek and DeLille, respectively. His thirty-five years of experience has led him to develop specific, innovative practices that are uncommon in the trade. For example, he has developed a pruning method that encourages thirty percent of a vine to grow straight up, thirty percent to branch to one side, and thirty percent to branch to the other, which creates a canopy that shields the grape clusters from the intense heat of direct Red Mountain sunlight, allowing the light to filter through the canopy at all times of day. He has also rotated the rows of his vineyards eleven degrees east off of North-South to extend the morning coolness and reduce the afternoon heat a little. To his knowledge, he’s the only one doing this, maybe because others “aren’t paying attention.”

Holmes hasn’t had to try to actively sell grapes for ten or twelve years, and at this point, he can screen potential buyers. His crops have been pre-sold, and people are banging down his door. In the early days, though, it was a lot of work and still is for many grapes, and say, ‘What kind of vineyard is it?’ and they’re like ‘Oh, this is the best vineyard in the world, we’re doing things just right, we hand-polish all the grapes, and boy are we hot shit,’ and they’ll come up with any kind of new scheme they have like ‘We’re super-biodynamic’ or we’re ‘super-organic,’ and it’s all bullshit. The thing is, how do the wines really shape up in the marketplace?” That’s why he personally tracks the point scores of all of the wines made from his grapes, along with any wines made with other Red Mountain grapes that score over a 90. This isn’t just for bragging rights, competitiveness or salability, but rather to measure how well they’re doing in the vineyard.

While Holmes has a great respect for the winemakers and partners closely with many of them, he adheres to the philosophy that wine is made in the vineyard. “Everything starts here,” he said, “If you don’t got it here, you don’t got it.” Maybe that’s why his vineyards get so much TLC. Thirty employees work year around (except in the dead of winter) in the vineyards. Most vineyards, he says, hire teams to prune and to pick, but at Ciel, there’s something going on all the time to make sure everything is going just right. He’s also gotten tech savvy: “All of our irrigation systems are either automated or in the process of being automated, where I can turn everything on or off from anywhere in the world. We have moisture monitors throughout so we know what the soil moisture is all the time and can respond to that.”

“A viticulturalist is a specialized farmer, but he’s still a farmer,” Holmes said, and while he’s seen the tide rise to where it is today, he’s as committed to the ground as he ever was, and has the pride of one who has developed something that will be his legacy. “A hundred years from now, Ciel will still be Ciel.”

Larry Pearson
Tapteil Vineyards

For once, we had no trouble finding a place. Tapteil Vineyards is located at the top of Red Mountain, growing sought-after vineyard-designate fruit, and we had visited the on-site winery last summer on our blitz tour of Red Mountain and Prosser. But, the winery is a comparatively recent edition to the Tapteil estate. Larry Pearson set up camp there twenty-five years ago with the singular purpose of planting Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

“I didn’t start this venture to be a winery,” he said, “I had this idea that stuck, of great experiences and wandering vineyards, that there’s something special about being able to grow a vine of Cabernet. I wanted to find a site to plant Cabernet Sauvignon.”

An engineer—a career he maintains to this day—he developed a long-term plan to get into the wine business. “Everyone comes to the wine business in a different way. There are a lot of different backgrounds. A lot of people came to the wine business from another profession, like me—I still have a day job as an engineer. I just wanted to grow the very best Cab Sauv.”

He started looking around for just the right site. “I looked up and down the valley, and I did my studies about the physical aspects of what it takes to grow grapes, and there was a little bit of experience in Washington State at the time, but there weren’t wide plantings, it wasn’t everywhere, so I did what I could to develop the physical criteria. Then I thought, well, what do the winemakers think, because I wasn’t a winemaker.”

They thought it needed a warmer climate, and as he kept asking around, he kept getting pushed down toward the Yakima Valley. He looked at Horse Heaven Hills, but wasn’t ready to live there, having come from Seattle, “That was really out in the middle of nowhere.”

Pearson is a planner and a business man who sees the romance in the vineyards. But, to achieve that, he spent many years away from it. Right after he bought his first property in June of 1984, he moved to Washington DC. He came back for in ’85 to help with the first planting of three acres, and then headed out again to make a living. Scott Williams managed the vineyards for the first few years, and then Fred Artz took over. Pearson eventually moved to Africa, and didn’t return until 1995.

All that time, he made decisions about sales, the purchase of equipment, the general flow of revenues and expense, but as for who made the calls for spraying, weeding, picking and all the other aspects of growing grapes, he had help from the pros.

Over time, he picked up the craft, and now has taken charge of the farming side of things as well. “I would count Scott and Fred as my mentors,” he said, “You can read those people to really be in tune about how to do things, and get a real practical viewpoint on how things should be done, rather than reading a book about it. Scott and Fred have been invaluable.”

Over the years, Pearson made himself available for all the plantings and other major milestones in the season. “Every time I’d be back, the more time I’d spend here and be wandering around, or getting on a tractor, I learned.”

Now, Pearson predominantly grows three varietals: Cabernet Sauvignon (his first love), Merlot and Cab Franc. Just outside of the AVA line, he has a small plot of Syrah, too.

And, while he still holds an engineering day job in the Tri-Cities, he’ll readily admit that he’s a farmer now.

Steve and Todd Newhouse
Upland Estate Vineyards

After pulling into the driveway of the home of Todd Newhouse, we climbed in the truck and headed to the top of Snipes Mountain, a steep and bumpy ride ending on the summit that seemed to overlook the world.

Todd is a friendly, amiable and genuine guy. His knowledge of the family business and his energy will be the future of Upland Estates, and the Snipes Mountain AVA. Todd’s grandfather planted the first grapes in the family back in 1968, trying to see how Chardonnay would grow. Later, they took over the vineyards of the original and abandoned Upland Estates, which were some of the first to plan grapes in the state as far back as around 1915. (They have also fairly recently revived the name of Upland Estates Winery, which is reputed to be the first winery in the state to make wine from European vinifera grapes.) Todd’s father Steve Newhouse joined him early on, and together, they made it what it is, 700 acres of wine grape vineyards, plus another 700 acres of concord grapes and cherry, peach, nectarine and pear orchards. “Every year we planted a little more and a little more,” Steve said.

Upland Estates is one of the classic farming models, family owned and operated, spanning across generations. Grandfather Newhouse is still around, Steve’s brother John was involved until mid-May when he was tragically killed in an accident involving irrigation equipment, Steve’s sister is the full-time bookkeeper, and now there’s Steve’s son Todd, heir to the proverbial throne.

Steve Newhouse joined us at the top of the hill. He’s a soft-spoken, gentle man with the slow gait of a man who has worn his body down with the lifetime of labor. In 2008, Steve Newhouse was given the Erick Hanson Memorial Wine Grape Grower of the Year award by the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers.

While Steve still enjoys the orchard aspects of the business (“The cherries are nice…peaches, nectarines, pears…” he said like a man planning a fruit salad), Todd especially likes the vineyards. “The wine grapes are the most interesting. If I have a choice, I’m in the wine grapes,” he said, “I count 35 or 36 that are vinifera.”

There are 850 acres of wine grapes on Snipes Mountain, and the Newhouses own 700 of them. Basically, they not only own a whole mountain, they own a whole AVA. “Yeah, I guess that’s why I was the one that got it submitted and the name on it and everything,” Todd told us. As for the few other producers on the hill, “They were all behind us. The other three have forty acres a piece, and they were real supportive and offered me any help I needed.” Steve piped in, “We knew we had a unique spot here, and most everybody else knew it too. The reason I wanted to do it was to raise the value of the grapes, because it really is a microclimate here.”

We asked them about the importance of the role of the vineyards. Todd thought for a second, “What do they say? You can screw up good grapes, but you can’t make a good wine out of bad grapes? Well, I guess grapes are pretty important.” Steve added, “You gotta have good grapes, if you start out with bad grapes, there isn’t anything you can do.”

These guys aren’t just viticulturalists. They are farmers in the broader sense. We asked them if they had any other aspirations down the road. Todd replied, “Other than farming? What else is there?”

(Read also about Ken Hart of Walla Walla fame in WINO’s Online Exclusive.)