Published October 2001

'A quality business'
Snohomish County vintners are part of a maturing statewide industry that is focused on making flavorful wines and a name for itself

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

Over in Eastern Washington, the news from the vineyards is good: The grape harvest is expected to reach a record 97,500 tons of quality fruit this year. And Tom Waliser, Chairman of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers, has said the crops should help state winemakers achieve “superior wines for the 2001 vintage.”

That’s good news on this side of the mountains, too, for Snohomish County wineries Quilceda Creek Vintners, Saintpaulia Vintners and SilverLake Winery.

“This is totally a quality business,” said Alex Golitzin, founder and co-owner of Snohomish-based Quilceda Creek. “There’s a lot of wine in the world; there’s really not a lot of great wine in the world. If you can produce great wine ...”

If you can produce great wine, you earn a reputation for craftsmanship and a loyal following among wine consumers, which Quilceda Creek, the 12th winery established in the state, has done.

Producing Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and a less expensive brand Red Wine, the 22-year-old winery run by Golitzin; his wife, Jeannette; his son, Paul; and sons-in-law Marv Crum and John Ware, produced 4,700 cases last year, cases that ended up in any one of 38 states or 10 countries. The wines vary in price from $65 or so for a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to $30 for a bottle of Quilceda Creek Red Wine.

Quilceda Creek’s winemaking process, which includes mixing the grapes with a semi-automatic pneumatic punch-down device, using three different yeasts in the fermentation process and aging the wine in new French oak barrels, has produced a product that has earned rave reviews from wine critics.

The winery's collection of press reviews includes one from Gerald Asher in Gourmet Magazine, who wrote that Quilceda Creek is “one of America’s best Cabernet Sauvignons,” and one from Robert M. Parker Jr. of The Wine Advocate, who wrote that Golitzin’s wines are “the most complex and age-worthy wines” he has encountered from Washington state.

All this renown has come despite “very little marketing” by the winery, Golitzin said. “It’s basically driven by quality.”

And that quality begins with the grapes, which is why Quilceda Creek has a stake in two vineyards in Eastern Washington: the Champoux Vineyard of Prosser and Ciel du Cheval Vineyards of Benton City.

“We want to be vertically integrated,” said Golitzin, who also gets grapes from Klipsun Vineyards and Taptiel Vineyards, both of Benton City. “It’s very important that the quality of the grapes, really, drives the quality of the wine. And if you don’t have control of the vineyard and its practices, you’re not going to necessarily” be able to control that quality.

Winemaker Paul Shinoda, owner of Snohomish-based Saintpaulia, also is co-venturing with a vineyard in the Red Mountain appellation of Eastern Washington to plant 10 acres of grapes for his Cabernet Sauvignon, of which he now produces 400 cases a year. For the 100 cases of Sauvignon Blanc he produces annually, he works closely with a vineyard in the Yakima Valley appellation.

And SilverLake, which has a winemaking facility in Bothell, has its own vineyard, Roza Hills near Zillah, which is a primary source of grapes for the 70,000 cases of red and white wines and hard-fruit ciders the winery produces annually, said Brad Hoffman, Director of Marketing and Public Relations.

This intermingling is a growing trend, said Steve Burns, Executive Director of the Washington Wine Commission, the Seattle-based nonprofit organization that works to build awareness of state wines.

“In the past, it was: ‘These are the growers; these are the wineries.’ The trend over the last decade is that wineries are investing in vineyards and vineyards are investing in wineries,” Burns said. “In many ways, (the state wine industry) is leap-frogging over the competition because of that cooperation.”

And leapfrogging in numbers, too.

Today, there are about 170 wineries across the state, Burns said. Compare that to five years ago, when there were 80, or 20 years ago when there were just 19. And the state is the second largest producer of wine in the United States behind California.

A recent economic impact study conducted by Motto Kryla & Fisher, an economic research firm specializing in the U.S. wine industry, found that Washington’s wine industry has a $2.4 billion impact on the state’s economy, with a work force of more than 11,000 as of January.

The study, commissioned by the WWC, WAWGG and the Washington Wine Institute, found the wine industry to have a ripple effect throughout other sectors of the economy, including tourism, marketing and promotion and financial institutions as well as in government tax revenues and license fees.

“The wine industry touches all counties and all four corners of the state. It’s part of the agricultural industry, the retail industry, the tourism industry,” Burns said.

In addition, the study found that more than 75 percent of the wine produced in the state — a value of $224.8 million — is shipped out of state, a figure that, when combined with the industry’s growth and “untapped consumer market,” points to a “strong” future, Burns said.

Area winemakers credit such growth to a statewide community of vintners focused on making quality wine and the state’s grape crop for giving them “good raw material” to work with, Shinoda said, pointing to the Eastern Washington climate.

Protected from coastal storms by the Cascades, Eastern Washington boasts warm, dry, sunny days with cool summer and early-autumn nights. The cooler nights keep the sugar levels from shooting up too quickly and allow for a “longer window to harvest in,” said Shinoda, who as owner of Shinoda Floral, has decades of horticultural experience. The extra time enables the flavors to develop and “catch up” to the grapes’ sugar level, he said. What vintners end up with in September and October is a quality harvest packed with flavor.

“So now, Washington Cabernets, Washington Merlots, Washington Syrahs are all starting to be known around the world as being among the most flavorful,” he said.

And, starting with the 2000 vintage, state wineries could sign up for the Washington Winery Quality Alliance.

The voluntary organization, developed by a group of researchers, winemakers and retailers, defines what wines can be labeled “reserve” (3,000 cases or 10 percent of a winery’s production — whichever is greater), and its members detail the wine grapes’ region of origin.

The alliance, which operates “like a subcommittee” of the WWC, is the “first statewide quality-focused initiative by the wine industry in America,” Burns said.

Already, about 100 wineries have signed up, and customers now are seeing bottles with the WWQA seals on them at the stores, he said.

The WWQA is an accomplishment in itself, Burns said, noting that California has been trying to define what makes a “reserve” wine for the past 16 years. And it points to a maturing industry here, an industry that “is very united.”

Shinoda agrees.

“We don’t have competitors; we have friends,” he said, adding that he ages 80 percent of his own wine in once-used oak barrels from Quilceda Creek. “We are all striving to make a better wine.”

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