In 1994, with our vineyard coming into full production, we started searching for a location to build our winery. The vineyard is near the town of Paterson, population 25, in a very isolated part of the state and we wanted to have a tasting room open to the public. We focused our search on the town of Walla Walla, seventy miles to the east of the vineyard, which has a larger population, attracts visitors and is the center of a growing wine community. When we discovered the historic Walla Walla Engine House, we knew we had found the perfect home. Though the Engine House was in excellent condition after its restoration, we had special needs in the way of plumbing, electricity, floor drains and environmental temperature control to make it a working winery. That July the necessary features were added to the Engine House while taking care to preserve its historic integrity. Shortly after these additions were made, we moved in just in time for our earliest-ever harvest that began on September 4, 1994. The brick walls and 32-foot ceilings of this stately old building provided us with the ideal environment to produce and age our wines for our first seven years of production. As the vineyard matured and production grew, so did the size of our staff and our need for additional space. In 2001 we built a state-of-the-art facility, which is a freestanding companion to the Engine House, allowing us to maintain the historic integrity of the original building. The charred beams of the old building now span a cellar of barrels filled with small lots of special wines, reserve bottlings and barrel-fermented whites. Our tasting room, bottling line and case goods remained in their original places. The addition is constructed with 10-inch thick concrete walls with a 4-inch thick layer of insulation in the middle, which efficiently maintains temperature. This construction helps us conserve energy and the space provides us with unlimited options for handling each lot of wine in a way that brings out its own unique expression of the vineyard. We have completely re-designed our crush area with an above ground belt-driven system and a large sorting area. This handles the fruit more gently than our original auger system and gives us the capability to remove any unwanted material. Small tanks allow us to pick in small lots, isolating unique areas of the vineyard that reflect their terroir. This also helps us track experiments that we conduct in the vineyard. All of these features allow us to fine tune our production techniques to match the vintage. Canoe Ridge Vineyard |