From grape to glass

Plenty of lush Merlot grapes still hung in clusters as Jeff Cox and Peter Boeger walked the Weinbau Vineyard near Mattawa, Wash. on a hot autumn harvest day. Specific grapes that were long-since picked, though, were the focus of their trip to Block 57 and Block 61.

The 460-acre property is one of six managed by Sagemoor Vineyards, a 50-year-old company growing grapes for some of the Northwest’s finest winemakers. Labels throughout the varietals—chardonnay to cabernet franc to syrah—mark rows reserved for specific companies. Blocks 57 and 61 are booked for PCC. They’ll go toward the private label wines Sagemoor is blending for the co-op, designed and developed with Cox and Boeger, the “Wine Guys” who oversee PCC’s wine, beer and spirits.

“The whole idea was for them to be included and do it the way they would if (PCC) were a winery,” said Kent Waliser, Sagemoor’s director of operations.

Private label products used to be seen as dubious generics—cheaper, but anonymously sourced. PCC has always taken a different approach, choosing exceptional producers and highlighting their participation, such as K’UL for PCC chocolates and Hollingsworth Hemp Company for PCC botanical lotions.

Adding wines was trickier. It’s one thing to approve and label what someone else has produced; quite another to design your own vision. And Cox, a merchandiser with PCC since 1999 and a Seattle Magazine Retail Wine Steward of the Year, has his own philosophy to prove in a bottle:

Forget wine’s reputation as “sophisticated, fancy stuff,” he says.

“It’s an agricultural thing, and people work their asses off (making it), and they get dirty. It’s not some magical mystical luxury, it’s hard work and lots of inspiration and know-how…

“You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of money to drink well.”

Knowing the source

Washington produces more wine than any other state except California—a stat that would have been mind-blowing in 1962 when a group of University of Washington professors incorporated Associated Vintners, later Columbia Winery, on a bet that our climate would support European-style wines. Even now, grapes are only its ninth-largest commodity crop, according to the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA)—valued at $308 million in 2020, the last year figures are available, compared with nearly $2 billion for our kingpin crop of apples.

To a farmer, apples and grapes are even harder to compare than apples and oranges. Just ask Waliser, a former board chairman of the Washington Wine Commission… and, earlier in his career, an apple grower for some 30 years.

On large farms with national distribution, “when you pick apples in the field and load the truck and the truck leaves—job done,” he said. “You don’t have to think about it anymore and the apples have no identity back to the farm. Nobody in New York is going to eat a Sagemoor apple and go “Wow, I want more Sagemoor apples.”

With wine, buyers know the source. They can save the bottle for years, and enjoy it as it changes over time.

“The flavor doesn’t go away. The wine doesn’t go away. So you’re going to be judged on grapes. Not just today, not just what you raise, but for years…

“You can’t do that with apples and cherries. Every season is its own and then it’s over.”

Growing grapes properly takes intense skilled management plus hard physical labor. On this day at Weinbau in the Wahluke Slope American Viticultural Areas (AVA), crews are shearing the sides and tops of leafy canopies. Each choice about where to cut might help the vine attain the proper leaf-to-fruit ratios, avoid sunburn on the fruit or make the hanging clusters easier to pick.

Vineyard manager Miguel Rodriguez calls the Weinbau vines festooned with purple and green “my babies.” At this stage he’s assessing grapes with a sugar-measuring refractometer—plus his own eyes and palate—directing crews on tending the vines and advising winemakers when their chosen rows approach the target ripeness for the characteristics they seek.

It’s mid-October when Cox and Boeger make this visit, but harvest is still in full swing—a month later than last year’s calendar. That one had ended two weeks earlier than normal.

“I don’t know what normal is now,” Rodriguez said ruefully in the harsh sunlight, as the temperature climbed toward 80 degrees. What matters is keeping watch—and working with what he has.

“I spent so much time in thinking about how to get to this crop. It was a little tough for us to make it to where we are right now, and we had to work really hard, but it’s worth it in the end, you know.”

Heat waves have been the recent challenge: “When the plants get to 90 degrees, they shut down… they’re like humans, they stress, they feel the heat.”

Decades of experience inform his decisions on how to plant or design a block of grapes; how to pare down clusters to concentrate their flavors; how to prune and when to pick. Sagemoor includes some of the Northwest’s oldest vines—“historic” by wine standards—and Rodriguez has practically grown up with them, working with Sagemoor since 1979 and this property since 1986. (One of Sagemoor’s wines is named after him, “Miguel The Man.”) The decades-old rows tend to be less productive, he said, but “with the years, they produce better flavors.”

That said, “Every year changes, and you have to manage the grapes to get quality, because if you don’t pay attention to details you lose the bottle.”

Rodriguez was awarded Grower of the Year in 2005 by the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers. He remembers sitting in the back of the room and the surprise of hearing his name—the first Mexican person to win the honor, he said, and a rare year when it wasn’t given to a winery owner.

What he does is notable for its care and labor—and its humility, Cox said.

“You couldn’t do it like Miguel does if you had this arrogance where you said, “Oh I know how to do this already.…People who think they know everything already can’t learn anything.”

Laying down tracks