Category: Featured Winery

VanArnam Vineyards

Over the years we, Kent and Allison VanArnam, have been asked many times about how we got started with our dream-come-true creation of vineyards and a winery. In 2007 after years of research as to the perfect place to grow fabulous wine grapes, we found the perfect spot in Zillah – 40 acres of fruit orchards with plenty of water and sun. Kent and his trusty tractor took out over 6,500 fruit trees and prepared the soil for grapes. With the help of family and friends, we planted our first Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard. Soon after we built our first building for wine tasting and production. Since that time, we have designed and created a production building, outdoor courtyard, concert stage, more vineyards, grill restaurant, rental cottage, several more outbuildings, our home and we are definitely not finished. We have many more ideas so keep coming to visit to see what we will create next. All of the design and most of the work is done by us following our love and passion for delicious wine and an experience of the Yakima Valley.

We focus on making the highest quality wines. Our size allows us to be hands-on every step of the way from nurturing our vineyards, picking the grapes at harvest and through all the wine making in the winery. We are located in Zillah which is in the Yakima Valley of Washington – the leading wine region in Washington state. Our vineyards grow on a southern slope of perfect soils for premium wine grapes. The winery rests on the top of a hill overlooking the vineyard and the Yakima Valley with views of both Mt Adams and Mt Rainer. We think our grapes like the views as much as we do 😊.
Tasting room address is 1305 Gilbert Road Zillah, WA 98953.  Please see our contact page for a map and directions.

Great news for those or you that follow wine ratings and awards.  Recently our 2013 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and our 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon earned first and second place awards in the annual SIP Northwest wine completion in Seattle – over 500 wineries submitted wines.  Our Melange received a 91 rating in Wine Spectator and all of our wines earned medals at both the American Wine Society Awards as well as the SanFrancisco Chronicle Wine Competition!

Our wines can also be ordered for shipment.  Simply use this link.

Source: VarnArnam Vineyards

Desert Wind Winery

Desert Wind is an immersive wine, food, and entertainment destination in the heart of Washington Wine Country, dedicated to producing world-class wines that celebrate our estate vineyards in the Wahluke Slope AVA. Our southwest-inspired estate is perched on a bluff overlooking the Yakima River in Prosser, Washington, and boasts a large tasting room, overnight accommodations, spa services, (and ample private event space). We currently share our wines with our wine club, in our tasting room, and in select distribution in the Northwest and beyond.

Vineyards

As an estate winery, we are stewards of the land we farm and committed to growing our fruit sustainably. Our goal is to make sure that our Desert Wind Estate Vineyard, which includes mostly 20+ year old vines, is able to produce high quality fruit for years to come. We are dedicated to producing wine that showcases the remarkable qualities of the Wahluke Slope and believe that having control over the entire process, from vine to wine to table, is the best way to remain true to that sense of place.

Winemaking

Wines are like stories, they’re meant to be shared. Desert Wind’s legacy and acclaimed wines are rooted in family and our sun-soaked Wahluke Slope AVA estate vineyard. Our philosophy on winemaking is simple: Start with grapes that show terrific potential and craft smooth, friendly, world-class wines you can drink every day. We’ve grown a lot since our first vines were planted in 1993, but one thing remains the same – our commitment to creating experiences that bring people together. 

Source: Desert Wind Winery

Sleight of Hand Cellars

 

ABOUT SLEIGHT OF HAND CELLARS

Sleight of Hand Cellars was founded in 2007 by Trey Busch and Jerry and Sandy Solomon. Our only goal from the outset has been to make world class wines while having the most fun that is legally possible. Our love of great wines from around the world, and our love of music, have inspired our vision and growth and have helped us reach a customer base that has the same passions as we do.

The winery has been open for just a dozen years, but in that time Sleight of Hand Cellars has been named one of “The Next Generation” of up and coming wineries in Washington State, as well as one of “The Next Cult Wineries” by Seattle Magazine. In addition, we have been featured in Wine Spectator magazine and had numerous wines in various of the industry’s “Top 100” lists, including, most recently, being named to the 2018 Wine Spectator Top 100 for our Levitation Syrah.

The Wine Advocate had this to say about our wines: “While I’ve always loved the wines from these guys, they’ve hit a new level recently, and the wines are now up there with the crème’ de la crème’ of the state (and beyond).”

These and other accolades forced our hand, and in 2011 the winery moved from a storefront location to its current property in southern Walla Walla where we continue to focus on the goal of making wines that compete with the best in the world, from a combination of Estate vineyards and non-estate vineyards in some of the top vineyard sites in Washington State. Upon acquiring our current property, the winery built a tasting room and production facility, and in 2014 we broke ground on a second barrel room to handle not only our increasing production levels, but also to allow us more space for more “toys” in keeping with our philosophy that every year offers an opportunity to make even better wines. In 2018, we crushed 164 tons of fruit, and we expect to bottle close to 10,000 cases of wine—which more than maxes out our current facility. With the past years’ increases in production, and our love for sharing our wines, in mid-2016 we began work on a tasting room in the SODO area of Seattle, which opened in August 2016.

Our tasting rooms are something everyone who loves wine and music should experience at least once (and hopefully often). We have over 2,000 albums from a wide range of musical genre, with turntables spinning vinyl in both of our tasting rooms as well in our new Wine Club Lounge at our Walla Walla property. Our love of ALL music inspires the wines we make (the production facility always has music—usually Seattle’s KEXP radio station–playing) as well as our marketing approach to reach our customers (we have the best winery t-shirts in the business). And our wine club, The Wine Illusionist Society, gets to enjoy our collaboration with one of our favorite music labels, Sub Pop Records in Seattle, because with each shipment we send them the latest and greatest songs on Sub Pop via digital download! 

Great wine, great music, and lots of fun—that’s our recipe for the Sleight of Hand lifestyle.

Source: Sleight of Hand Cellars

Prospice Wines

ABOUT PROSPICE

Prospice is the creation of two friends with a shared vision for wines and winemaking.  Each changed course from a prior professional career, drawn to winemaking by the impulse to craft an artisanal product.

At Prospice our focus is on making balanced and elegant wines that celebrate the source fruit and the vineyard sites.  We seek to roll back the clock on the modern trend toward riper, more extracted wines, preferring a lighter touch of oak and balanced extraction and alcohol.  We embrace modern scientific research into fermentation and aging, and the use of chemical analyses to understand and guide the production of the best wines we can possibly make from that fruit, but minimize the use of overly manipulative additives or techniques.  We use predominantly neutral oak barrels for aging, but employ a small number of new oak barrels — always of a carefully selected style and cooperage to complement the wine to be aged.

Throughout the process, the science, the analyses, the techniques, and the barrels are all ultimately in the service of the most subjective but most important tool we have:  our palate.  Ultimately, a wine is a small work of art in a bottle, and we seek to make each Prospice wine unique, expressive, and beautiful.

ABOUT THE NAME

Our name “Prospice,” from the Latin for “look to the future,” represents both our belief in the inherently optimistic and forward-looking nature of wine and winemaking and our respect for their deeply rooted traditions.  The clean, modern lines of the Prospice name in our logo sit in counterpoint to the lower rendering of the same name in ancient Etruscan characters (read from right to left), signifying this dichotomy of future and past.

Winemaking is full of moments of anticipation and expectation.  A grower who has found the perfect new vineyard site can close her eyes and see the rows of trellised vines that will eventually span the landscape.  Every year as spring arrives, grower and winemaker alike begin to roam the vineyard, carefully tracking the progress of budbreak, bloom, fruit set, veraison, ripening — ever envisioning the harvest that lies ahead.  As freshly-harvested fruit reaches the winery, the winemaker tastes and begins to envision the future of this incipient wine.  At every stage of ferment and aging, and as the wine goes into bottle, the winemaker recites an insistent and repeated mantra —  “I can’t wait to see what this wine becomes…” — whether in a year, two years, or twenty.

While winemaking is full of this future-oriented vision, there is also an unshakable reverence for the ancient origins of the craft.  The overwhelming majority of fine wine in modern times will spend at least some time in an oak barrel that would be entirely recognizable to a winemaker in Roman times.  Other ancient materials and techniques (such as concrete fermenters and clay amphorae) are experiencing a huge resurgence in modern wineries.  Where the geology supports it, many wineries still age wines in caves hewn from solid rock.  In spite of multiple alternatives that are arguably superior in every way, winemakers and consumers alike still cling stubbornly to the use of cork to seal wine bottles.

Prospice — the name and the winery — is a celebration of the past, of all the years of experience that have brought the winemaking craft to where it is today, and a means to carry that craft into an exciting future.  We hope you will join us for the adventure.

 

Source Prospice Wines