Q: What initially captivated you about wine? When did you decide to make it your avocation?
A: Living in Germany as a guest of the US Army, I fell in love with the landscape. I lived off base with my wife and we volunteered to work on farms in our spare time. I worked for three days at a brewery near the town of Furth. Johann, the owner decried the use of premalted grain that was coming into Germany much as I decry the separation of vineyards from wineries today. I asked Johann how it could be that Germany had ten times the population density of New Jersey where I had grown up but yet the landscape was so beautiful. He took me to his home where we ate outside. He held up his plate and pointed to his potatoes. He asked me if I understood the symbolism. I said, "what symbolism?" He then pointed to the field next to us and told me that was where the potatoes came from.
He worked his way around the plate and around the landscape. He told me, "If you can see where your food comes from you live in beauty" "If you cannot see where your food comes from you are doomed to live in ugliness." As I went on to work in vineyards and to make wine, I saw the same link between food, wine, land, beauty, and spirituality and I used the model I saw in Europe of a small family farm winery where the sale of wine not only supported the family, it supported the beauty of the farm.

Q: People are easily ensconced about the romantic world of wine. From your perspective, what is their biggest underestimation?
A: I don't think people in general and winemakers in particular realize just how much romance has been lost as wine has become a technological product. There is still great romance in the vineyard. I like to tell people in our tasting room that, "I lift this wine out of the earth and into your glass". People read Hugh Johnson and see pretty pictures of the vigneron working in the field and making wine. What they do not yet see is how marketing and technology have worked to leave but a shell of romance. Cheddar is a valley in England, Burgundy is a region of France but marketers have appropriated place names because it makes good business sense. Varietal labeling was one of the first steps in taking place out of wine. If you take sugar and acid additions, then special yeasts and bacteria, later tannins and oak chips, wine is hardly the product of a place anymore. Industrializing wine by shipping grapes from region to region just finalizes the process.

Q: You grow a mix of crosses and vinifera vines--will you keep that balance or are you moving to 100% of a species?
A: All our wines are Vitis vinifera. We have a few test vines of hybrids and are really interested in the German hybrid "Regent", which the German parliament declared not to be a hybrid even though it is so that growers in Germany could legally grow it. In our climate it would never need to be sprayed. Now, Germans call vinifera/vinifera crossings to be hybrids, but hybrids have to be the result of crossing species. So Siegerrebe which is a Madeliene Angevine/Gewurtztraminer crossing is just that, a cross but not a hybrid. Baco noir, Chancellor, Vidal, Seyval Blanc, Leon Millot are all real hybrids.

Q: You mentioned that wine "is becoming better and better but more the same." What do you mean?
A: My first "epiphany" came about in South Africa. Tasting wonderful Cab/Merlot blends I realized that without the labels I could not tell that wine from a California, Australia, Chilean, or Argentinian wine. Juice modification which is in all the wine schools and textbooks has moved across the world. I believe I could put on a tasting that would ask "what continent do these wines come from" and most folks would not be able to tell.

Q: While many embrace the notion (concept) of Terroir, there doesn't seem to be much scientific data available to accurately account for the differences it attributes in grapes (and hence the wine). At what point does one leave science and take terroir on "faith"?
A: The Germans had a classic experiment in which they excavated soil from vineyard A in one region, hauled it to region B where it was replaced carefully in a hole in the middle of a vineyard, They did the same with a vineyard in Region C. Now you had a bit of region A growing in region B and C, Region B growing in region A and C. and region A also got
vineyard soil from the other two regions. Each displaced vineyard was separated from the soil around it with concrete walls so there could be no mixing. Years later, they compared wines from each of the transplanted vineyards with the wines from the surrounding vineyards. What they found was that soil types seemed to have little influence on the wines, but, climate did matter. The wines from the transplanted vineyards were much more like that of their neighbors than they were like the wines from where the soil had come from.

As a physical geographer though, I know that soils are linked to climates as much as they are to parent rocks. I also know that terroir means more than dirt, it means soil, climate, and the culture of the region. Why do Germans deal with high acid in juice by blending back sweet reserve, while the French deal with the same problem by using malolactic bacteria? Why did the loss of chestnut forests and the move to small oak barrels become a part of French winemaking while the Germans used large barrels over andover again with no wood character given to the wine? All these are a
part of terroir. They are based on climate and soil but modified by centuries of culture.

Q: What will a person experience at your winery should they come visit?
A: A visitor to our winery usually notices the beauty. The farm we are on produces between 80 and 100 tons of edible products a year. All of this just 8 air miles from the center of Seattle. We try to share that beauty of place with the visitor. We emphasize the "qualities" of wine, the taste, the aroma, the landscape, the vines themselves, and the ability to talk to the people who actually work in the vines. We do most of our own vineyard work and by doing so we are able to communicate some of the real romance of wine in a way that folks who do not get down on their knees to prune and pick cannot.

We emphasize that our wines have lower alcohol levels and thus less power than wines from hot summer areas, but, that our wines have layered levels of aromatic complexity that is usually burned out by the same heat that raises alcohol. I tell them if they want a big bloody piece of steak they should get some wine from Eastern Washington or some other hot summer growing region, but if they want wine that goes with the foods grown in the Puget Sound region they have come to the right place. Seafood, lamb, fowl and locally grown vegetables, that is what grows here and it goes with the wine that is grown here. Just like in Europe.

I use the concept of "kissing strangers" to try to illustrate what an Estate Winery has to offer. You walk down the street. You see an attractive person, your eyes meet, you embrace, you kiss, you walk away. Tasting wine from a winery without a vineyard is just like kissing a stranger, very exciting, but totally meaningless. Tasting wine at an industrial (industrialization is the separation of the means of production for greater efficiency) winery is like listening to recorded music. The vineyard is the orchestra, the wine is the sound. If you went to a concert and there were no performers, only a cd player you would immediately understand that you were not getting the full experience. Visiting wineries that don't grow grapes also deprives you of the full experience.