Thru The Grapewine

What's the Secret Behind Damsel Cellars' Success? Meet Winemaker Mari Womack

• Ute Mitchell • Episode 35

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Are you ready to uncork the story behind the awe-inspiring Mari Womack, who transitioned from a background in psychology to landscape design and horticulture to become the owner and winemaker of Damsel Cellars? Mari takes us on a journey, revealing her path from the restaurant industry to the captivating world of wine. The passion she exudes is palpable as she narrates her daring leap into winemaking, navigating the world of hospitality and wine pairing, and embracing opportunities in an unfamiliar terrain. Mari's vivacious narrative is a testament to the power of saying 'yes', even when the path ahead isn't crystal clear.

As you soak in Mari's tale, you'll be drawn into the intricate process of building Damsel Cellars. Mari shares enticing details about how she nurtures relationships with vineyard partners and infuses her business with female-centric elements in an industry typically dominated by men. Her determined spirit and hard work in creating amazing wine will inspire you. Her experience as a woman in the winemaking industry is a refreshing narrative of camaraderie and support.

In the concluding moments of our conversation, Mari emphasizes the pivotal role of mentorship, underlining her commitment to uplifting other women in the industry. Her admiration for Kay Simon, a trailblazing woman winemaker, is evident as she dreams of a side-by-side tasting of their Cabernet Franc at Boucher Vineyard.  Listen in on this delightful episode and let us know what you think!

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Ute:

Hello again and a warm welcome to the Thru The Grapewine podcast. I am your host, Ute Mitchell, and today I am chatting with Mari Womack, who is the owner and winemaker at Damsel Cellars, so welcome.

Mari:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you inviting me on.

Ute:

Well, I'm so glad that you were recommended to me because there's a lot of cool stuff going on on your website, so we're going to talk about all of that. It's awesome. So why don't we just start out by you kind of telling me a little bit about yourself, like, did you grow up in Washington? What did you go to school for? Kind of like, who are you?

Mari:

I am a native Washingtonian. I've lived here my whole life. I grew up down in Renton and I went to the University of Washington. I stayed here locally and I actually went to school for psychology, not winemaking, so that part came much later. But I found my love of wine really working in restaurants to help make some money for school.

Mari:

So that's really where the food and wine pairing happened and a lot of that really kind of fun meshing of learning about wine, learning about food wine and just being introduced to hospitality at an early age.

Ute:

Right, yeah. So your website says in your about page is that you were working for restaurants. So were you a server in a restaurant or in restaurants?

Mari:

I was very much front of the house for sure. Serving, helping out, bartending, that kind of thing.

Ute:

Sure.

Mari:

My partner of 22 years at this point. He actually owned multiple restaurants which I helped with. Oh gosh, you know business and things like that. I got to know some people in the industry that way, but yeah, it was sort of a part of my life for a very long time. But simultaneously with helping in the restaurants I also went back to school and got a degree in landscape design and horticulture.

Mari:

So really I've always understood the plant side of things long before I understood the wine and vinification and also you know kind of the very circuitous route back to winemaking. I worked in real estate, so I've had my residential real estate license for like the last 19 years and, as everybody probably horribly remembers, the market kind of crashed a little bit back in 2008. But 2009 was the worst year I had on record and we had just sold one of the last restaurants and so I had all this time on my hands and that love of wine, that passion for wine was always sort of, you know, kind of like mingling the back of your mind a little bit. It was always just kind of there.

Mari:

And so during that break when you know I had a lot of weekends free I came out and started volunteering right here in my backyard in Woodinville and found this wonderful community of winemakers and tasting room managers and all these people that were just really excited and passionate about wine. And so I started volunteering at Obelisco winery when they had one wine. They just had their one Cabernet at that point.

Ute:

Right.

Mari:

They were not the behemoth they are now. And through that experience I just kept meeting people. Everyone out here is such a wonderful kind of connector that once you start showing an interest, you know whether it's the production side, whether it's, you know, expanding your palate, you know maybe the [.] side of things. Once you start showing that interest and start talking about it, people will naturally just start putting you together with the right people in the right place.

Ute:

Yeah.

Mari:

And I ended up volunteering and doing a harvest with Baer Winery.

Mari:

And that was really, really fun. Once I saw what was going on in the production side of things, I just completely freaked out. It kind of crossed my mind a little bit and you know really, just you know, dove head first into this idea of having my own winery, without really knowing much about how to do it or how to go about it. Yeah so, yeah, it was really. It was really just sort of a passion driven opportunity, driven window of time that started this whole process of dams all.

Ute:

Wow, that is so amazing, and I always love hearing stories of women who are literally just kind of jumping into something. There's like something just burning inside and you're like I got to do this, I got to figure this out one way or another, even though it's super, super scary. And then you go and do it anyway.

Mari:

Yeah, and it was really opportunity and just timing and the ability to be able to say yes to those opportunities. And you know, not having gone to school to learn, you know about viticulture and analogy it was really a very steep learning curve and it was really almost like an apprenticeship where you know Right, learn the skills by doing yeah and it was a lot of hard work.

Mari:

But you know, I, I didn't know what I didn't know, so I didn't know to be scared. I didn't know that it was gonna take that much time, energy and money, right? So you know, there wasn't anything to really fear, it was just a matter of working, working the problem. You know when things would come up. Can I, can I, say yes, and and you, just you, find a way to say yes. Oh my gosh.

Ute:

Yeah, that I can only imagine and you know, and sometimes maybe it's a good thing that you don't know, because the fear can certainly hold you back. I I certainly have had a fair share of that myself in the past when, when I didn't know what was gonna happen, I'd be like, yeah, let's do this. And when I did know, kind of sort of what might happen, fear always kind of help me back a little bit more. You know, ultimately I would go for it anyway, but there was always this fear factor that just kind of slowed me down a little bit.

Mari:

Yeah, it is kind of funny when you think that maybe not knowing something is the better path than you know Understanding the outcome and being worried or or risk averse.

Ute:

Yeah.

Mari:

You know, I've been told that I don't have a lot of that fear of risk-taking, that I kind of just like I jump out the plane door and I just have faith that the parachute Okay, it's gonna be fine. I Practiced it correctly, it's all right on. But at the same time, when you don't know, you know what to expect.

Ute:

And.

Mari:

I think you can be really. You can be really positive and hopeful that the outcome isn't isn't gonna be scary, that you're gonna figure it out. So I guess yeah, and in a sense I was lucky that way I didn't have a lot of baggage. It was really building skills to to find the solutions to those, whatever those problems might be or those issues that came up.

Ute:

Right. So now I'm gonna have to ask did you ever go skydiving?

Mari:

All right, you know, it might just be fine.

Ute:

Yeah, that is one of those things where I'm going. No, no, not doing it, you know as I get older.

Mari:

Some of those things that I thought might be those adrenaline rushes when I was younger don't seem like such smart judgment. I don't need it.

Ute:

Yeah, exactly, so okay, I do want to know about damsel sellers, because Just the, the name by itself is so great and I have to wonder. I need to know how did you come up with that?

Mari:

So I was the assistant winemaker at Darby winery.

Mari:

Mm-hmm and at the time Darby was friends.

Mari:

Darby English was friends with a lot of other winemakers that were really kind of the up-and-coming rock stars that are really leading the way a lot in Washington wine right now, 10, 12 years ago, and he and all of these people call themselves the great killers.

Mari:

You know, it's the Chris Gorman and Mark MacNeely and Chris Sparkman and you know, and Bear winery and Tim Stevens, all these guys and they had these really cool labels and they were very edgy, you know, and really, you know, kind of daring compared to the old guard of Washington wine, very classic, beautiful. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hang with these guys, I'm gonna like have these edgy, dark, you know, cool named wines. But the more that I thought about it, my partner suggested the name dams alone. You know, of course, like, as as many people who start small businesses and things, you know, you have this long list of names for your business and all these clever you know tag lines and slogans and whatnot. So I had this huge long list on my phone but the more I looked at it, the more dams will really resonated with me.

Mari:

You know, and I thought, the more I thought about it, it was, it was a classic sort of thing, had a nod to that feminine aspect. Sure there's not a huge number of women wine makers, so I really wanted it to be something somewhat. Yeah, yeah but it had that romance and Sort of expression of how I feel about wine. I do think it's very feminine. I love all the Descriptors that we use for wine. They seem very, very Women-centric somewhat in the descriptions that we use. It's so true, isn't?

Ute:

it.

Mari:

You're growing and creating this thing and bringing this thing to life. You know, there's a very feminine aspect to wine that I really love, but the history and romance of that word, damsel really Doesn't mean anything other than an unmarried woman of royal birth.

Ute:

Mm-hmm.

Mari:

That's literally what the old, you know meaning of the word is the stand right that thing came up much, much later, but I really wanted to take that back and have something that I thought was Romantic and had a ritual and a feminine lean to it, and it just sort of worked. So I really didn't come up with a lot of clever names for my wines. I Really just wanted it to be something strong but beautiful and and feminine and really just didn't.

Mari:

Didn't go much further than that. I guess I'm not as edgy as I thought you know, Well, I, I love the name.

Ute:

I think it's pretty brilliant and and I really like this idea of it, you know, having these roots in history and the label Pretty much telling you right there, this is woman owned, this is woman made. I Love that. I think that's beautiful.

Mari:

Thank you.

Ute:

So, with you being up in woodenville, the grapes do have to be from somewhere else, and so I see some pretty bold wines there. On the page I saw a saurat, a granage Moved. Where are the grapes from, and do you own any of the vineyards or do you purchase the grapes? How does that all work? How do I have to envision that?

Mari:

So we have relationships with family owned vineyards through kind of down through the center of Columbia Valley and Our long-standing relationships with Boucher vineyard, discovery vineyard, still Water Creek vineyard. There's all family owned vineyards I've been working with for a number of years. Okay we're really lovely Deliberative relationship with the growers and the families that own those vineyards. They're beautifully managed and wonderful and One day a state fruit would be great. I would love to control the process from start to finish, but that that takes a whole another skill set and a lifetime of learning.

Mari:

I feel like I for me to come in and pretend that I have the kind of knowledge that you know, the people who have, who have owned and and farmed that land, for you know, in some cases 40 years, is just well. That would just be downright arrogant.

Mari:

Like I don't have that knowledge, I would love to again like control the whole process and have my own fruit, but it's not in the cards right now and I'm really, I'm really lucky to get the fruit that I do. Yeah, we've. We've been able to add some additional vineyards to our portfolio. We're working out at Candy Mountain now, which is one of the newest AVAs.

Ute:

Okay, I was going to ask about that next.

Mari:

Yeah, it's a really hot site right next door to Red Mountain, very, very small. We're getting some Cabernet and some Mall back there, so some bigger Bordeaux varietals. And then we've added some whites from McNary Vineyard, which is Horse Heaven Hills, and some from Zilla Ranch. So some Pino Green, some Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and fun things to really expand our white portfolio too. So building those relationships with those growers is really, really important. Oh, sure.

Mari:

We work out to the vineyards a lot and hopefully you know we can. We can find that relationship where I'm able to sort of explain stylistically and show you know what I am trying to make as the final product. So then we can talk about growing practices, we can talk about, you know, the yields, what we're looking for as far as clusters and berry sizes and all that good stuff, to try and work together Despite what Mother Nature might be throwing at us from, you know, vintage to vintage. This has been kind of crazy here in Washington the last few years. You know, last year was incredibly cold. We started about three weeks late. This year, much more on a more traditional yeah yeah.

Mari:

But you know, building those relationships with our vineyard partners is crucial. One of one of the growers he's fantastic. He basically always says that you know a third is what the vine and you know the growing season, like what Mother Nature is giving you that year. A third is the responsibility of the grower and the choices that the grower is making in the vineyard. Yeah, and then a third relies on the end product of what we, as winemakers, do with that fruit.

Ute:

Right so it really.

Mari:

It really is a lot of teamwork and reliance on other people and their skills and their talent and thank goodness, we have amazing vineyard partners.

Ute:

Yeah, it's so incredible how much work goes into it. We on the tasting room side don't see that. You know you walk into a winery, you're thinking of it being just beautiful and elevated and you know it's just, you're getting this whole experience. But nobody really truly understands what's going on on the other side of that and the amount of work that goes into it and the amount of skill it takes and sometimes the headaches and the anxiety and the fear of what is going to happen with the weather.

Ute:

I think last year that was such a big deal when we had that late frost in April and then nobody knew. You know, early on I was talking to some people who were saying, yeah, we lost practically all of our Chardonnay grapes and then it turned out to be a really great year after all, because all of a sudden we had this long, warm summer. And I remember I actually went to Germany in September, so early September, and at that time in southern Germany they were already harvesting and it was, I mean, the beginning of September. I got there I think the sixth or the seventh and they were already harvesting and I came back in early October and they were just starting harvest in Oregon and it just kind of blew me away how it turned out to be a really great harvest after all.

Mari:

Yeah, and that's the thing you know. Every single year is a different test of yourself, you know, whether it's in your management, whether it's you know the benification, whether it's you know winemakers making choices about whether we have incredibly ripe fruit, whether we picked on time, you know, did we pick in the right window? If this fruit is, you know, not as ripe as we normally get, there's not as much sugar. Are we going to have a lower alcohol? Does that mean less new oak? Like all of these choices that you make, the variables you know can be, can be really numerous, and every year you get to, you know, for the fun or stress or however you view, that you get to test those skills every year and 90% of winemaking is problem solving.

Mari:

Yeah you know it's. How good can you, can you solve that problem, how well can you make those choices to you know, really affect the best product you can make, the best wine you can make.

Ute:

And it's every year.

Mari:

Every year is different. Yeah, and to your point, you know you really rely on a lot of people to help get you that fruit and to say that you know ag workers or agriculture is unskilled labor? It is not. I dare you to go out and try it, thank you for saying that you will find out exactly how hard it is and how much skill really is involved.

Mari:

And so I mean to go back even further. Do I want my own vineyard? Now, you know, the more I talk about it, no, I'm good. And why in that be like, maybe not, maybe, not, maybe I'm good, maybe just a small parcel of land a little bit right, right, I feel like there's to play with, but no like when we're talking about managing you know more than 100, or you know 200 acres or something like that that's. It's a whole different skill set.

Ute:

Oh for sure, yeah, yeah. So let's shift directions just a little bit, kind of going a little bit to your personal preferences when it comes to wine, are you more of a whites person or of the reds, or do you not have a preference? Because I've I'm coming across more and more people are saying do I have to choose, when, personally, I'm like all about the reds and I'm starting to like more whites, but I'm still all about the reds?

Mari:

Okay, I have always had a very fond spot for the Rhone varietals. I love Sera. I love Sera in Washington. And how? Different it can be based on where it's grown in, the different ABAs, the different elevations. It's just, it's really a fun, fun grape. A lot of what I like about Sera really is on the winemaking side.

Mari:

I mean, I love how it tastes, it's delicious, I can try to say, if I'm stuck on an island, sure, great, throw the Sera at me, but it it's very playful. And the Rhone varietals, I think, are much more playful from a winemaking standpoint, where if you are creative or artistic or want to experiment with with wines, those wines I think tend to go there with you a little bit more easily. With Sera, you know, you can co-ferment it with V&A. I've co-fermented it with other reds too, with Grenoche, mavette, we've co-fermented a lot of that. You can add stems, you know, if you want that, stem extraction, whole cluster fermentation you can do all of these really fun things.

Mari:

You know, foot stomping, do all kinds of fun things that maybe you wouldn't choose to do with Bordeaux varietals. You wouldn't want those stems in. Maybe with your cab it might extract some of those bitter qualities you know. So I mean, I think, where I find the Bordeaux varietals a little more prescriptive, I find the Rhone varietals just incredibly fun and creative and you can just make all kinds of different choices and be a little bit freer, I think, to play. So those are really fun for me.

Mari:

So, yeah, I like the Rhone reds. As far as the whites, I've really enjoyed making whites. It's a lot more difficult, I think, to make really expressive and good white wine, like good solid whites I think are safer. But that's how we've grown our program in the last couple of years. We've grown by about 50% in the last year or so, in the last last wow, that's amazing. We expanded a lot by doing whites, and so for me that's sort of my new obsession, I think, just because I need to learn that or become much more comfortable with that.

Mari:

So I've been obsessed sort of with studying and reading and techniques and like all of these fun things doing the research. So I've been kind of immersed in the white wine area for the last year or so but we've always really made a Marson that I really love. So I think you know of the whites I'm really enamored with our Marson. Right, we actually do a little old school, a little new school so we ferment it in barrel and really try to encourage a lot of those aromatics and all of that building of the body of the Marson to kind of keep that fun and traditional. But then because we have so much like vibrant fruit and acid here in Washington like that's sort of our fruit is sort of expressive in that particular way we just have a really nice acidic sort of finish to the wines that we tank it up in stainless steel and then finish it in the stainless steel so it still has that lift, you know, at the back of your palate, so that one's really really fun.

Mari:

a really nice, complex but really fun wine to make.

Ute:

Sure.

Mari:

So I'm all over the board too. I'm picking favorites.

Ute:

Well, you know, I manage a tasting room for Cougar Crest. I know they have a tasting room up in Woodenville as well, but they have such a big variety of different wines. You know, as far as the whites go, we have the Vignette and a Chardonnay and an Albarino, and then lots and lots of different reds. And to your point of the Soura and how much fun it is to blend it, there's two wines that Debbie makes and one of them is a 50-50 blend of Soura and Tempranillo, so she calls it Sourillo. And the other one is our Encore and it is 50% Soura and 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, and both of those wines are so wildly popular among our members and guests and us in the tasting room. We really love it too. So yes, a lot of fun apparently to blend the Soura into all kinds of really fun wines.

Mari:

Soura is really a fun component like that. Obviously it's a beautiful standalone wine. Yeah, oh sure At the same time, because of that really rich sort of mouthfeel that Soura can have it really fills in the mid-palate. So if you have like those donut wines, you know that are like powerful up front and have a really long finish like a lot of young Bordeaux varietals do a little bit.

Mari:

A little bit of Soura can really just round out that mid-palate and make wines feel softer and feel a little bit more full and mature. So yeah, we always throw Soura into our red blend, just you know. For that exact reason, yeah, yeah, yes.

Ute:

So woman in the wine industry. I always have to ask my guest this, because we're all about elevating women in the industry. Have you experienced any roadblocks in the industry, or has it just been smooth sailing? I'm really curious for your experience in this department.

Mari:

You know, among the people that I work with in the industry, I have had nothing but support, really.

Ute:

That's amazing.

Mari:

I actually, you know I worked. I worked for Darby English at Darby Winery and you know he said if you can't do everything I can do, you're not going to be that useful. So go learn how to drive the forklift, go rehydrate that yeast, go do those punchdowns, go assemble you know the pressure distimmer, go fix the press, whatever it was. Yeah, there wasn't anything that was really off limits or felt limited in any way, and then after that I just started my own thing. So I've been my own boss for a really long time.

Mari:

I'm not sure if that has sort of, you know, stepped. I've sort of sidestepped any of those issues that other people I know in the industry have had coming up or skepticism about their qualifications or strength or skills. I have not personally encountered much of that at all, which is great. I've felt nothing but supported and I hope that, you know, I can actually bring more women into the industry through mentorship and hiring practices and things like that, where I can give people that comfortable space to hopefully, you know, increase diversity, you know, and increase the role that women have in the industry. There's always been women in this industry. It's just visibility factor has been, I think, lower, I mean there's always been women in line always.

Ute:

Yeah, oh sure, yeah it's just, it's that visibility factor.

Mari:

Yeah, I get more surprise or you know, incredulous comments or looks more from consumers than anyone else. Weirdly, you're the line maker, you make the line. I'm saying that at events and things like that, it's more the consumer, it's not the industry.

Ute:

Right.

Mari:

There are many, many women in the industry that I look up to. There are many men that have been wonderful allies, so I have had a great experience.

Ute:

Truthfully, that is fantastic. I hope that I can pass that on. Yeah, so you and you did mention mentorship. Are you actively mentoring women who are coming into the industry?

Mari:

Yeah, the Alliance of Women of Washington Wine. We actually have a formal mentorship program that I participate in, so I've been doing that for a couple of years, and there are also some more informal relationships with younger women in the industry that we all kind of lean on each other and have a really tight network, which is really great. So, yeah, yeah, mentorship is important?

Ute:

Yeah, absolutely. That's wonderful. Yeah, the Women in Wine Oregon chapter is doing mentorship programs like that as well. Each year, you can apply to be a mentee and then work with a mentor for a certain amount of time during that calendar year, so that's pretty cool, and I love that we're doing this for other women. So do you have, then, a person that you look up to, someone you aspire to be like, and it can't be a man or a woman.

Mari:

We had an event recently where we were honoring some of the women in Washington Wine that had come before us and I have always admired Kay Simon and she started making wine you know, chateau San Michele in the mid-70s there were a few women there at the time. She always struck me as someone who just had that zest, that leadership, that push and that drive and she left Chateau San Michele to do her own thing at Chinook Winery. And I've just sort of watched her career and it's been quiet and it's been steady and steadfast and I think sometimes by just simply being present and doing an amazing job at what you do is really sometimes incredibly powerful. It's not always the person who yells the loudest, it's not always the person that's standing screaming with a megaphone on the soapbox. A lot of times a very steady, successful presence and just that carriage of confidence and certainty and knowledge that what she's doing she's doing incredibly well. She's just somebody I've always watched kind of quietly, which is really fantastic.

Mari:

And when I found out she was getting her Cabernet Franc which I love from Boucher Vineyard and I was also making a Cabernet Franc from Boucher Vineyard I was very, very excited and I understand that she picks her Cabernet Franc very late and I think for similar reasons. I was doing a little research. You really want to make sure the Cab Franc gets very ripe. You burn your pyrazine compounds.

Ute:

You don't get that bitter green veggie quality.

Mari:

Well, that stuff just make a really beautiful, rich, red-fruited, lovely wine. I've still never picked later than she has. She always picks later than I do, no matter how long I wait. All right, see, now I love that. I'm waiting to run into her at the vineyard amongst the Cabernet Franc.

Mari:

But anyway, she was somebody that I really just admire for her quiet fortitude and her strength, her ability to just be there and be present for all these years and to start at what I assume was a time and based on some of the stories she shared at this meeting, at this ceremony, it was much more difficult for she and her counterparts back in the 70s than it is for us today. So I appreciate all of those women who went through that, who did break that glass ceiling and really start that road and that path for a lot of us that are here now.

Ute:

Oh my gosh, Wouldn't it be so cool if you actually at some point did your harvest at kind of at the same time, and then you meet up and you do a side-by-side, tasting on your Cab Franc.

Mari:

Walking through sampling our Cabernet Franc. It would be great, it would be really fun. Goals, goals I love that Okay.

Ute:

Well, you heard it here. If you know, let's get these women together. So let's assume you had to be a winemaker somewhere else in the world and couldn't do it where you are now. Where in the world would you want to be?

Mari:

That's such a tough question. Really, I would love to think that I would go somewhere exotic and wonderful, but truthfully, I visit Paso Robles, like all the time and I'm in love with the central coast of California. All right, okay, the idea. It's just so beautiful there. Currently, in my current winemaking situation, I'm in the warehouse district in Woodenville and so I make wine surrounded by like industrial complexes, all concrete back alley, like warehouse space, and every time I visit Paso it's like these rolling, beautiful hills. You can be at the ocean in 12 minutes.

Mari:

So you literally go like paddle boarding in the morning. Get back in your little truck, drive 20 minutes and be back at your winery and like work on the wine all afternoon and you know it's just such a really lovely vibe down there and it still has a very small town feel to it. I know there's like 400 wineries or something down there right now, but I really just you know it's right, I feel like it's right in my backyard.

Mari:

And it just has, like that ocean and sun and wine, like all of the things that I love.

Ute:

And it's so close and so empty and it's right there.

Mari:

I would love to be like I'm gonna go to Argentina or, you know, south Africa. No, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna go to the central coast, okay, well you know, I'm not very edgy. I told you I'm not very edgy.

Ute:

I don't know. I don't know if you're gonna ever jump out of a plane at this point.

Mari:

No, I don't think I'm gonna stay here over. I'm not super adventurous.

Ute:

Oh gosh, what. Have you traveled to any of those other regions that you just brought up?

Mari:

I haven't much. I mean, I've done a little bit of touring in France and a little bit in Italy, and, yes, both very lovely and wonderful, but I view those more as vacation spots, though. Every time I'm on vacation and I don't want to work when I'm there, I just want to eat eat more food and drink more. I don't think I'd want to work too hard, but Right, mm-hmm.

Ute:

Yeah, I get that. We went to Burgundy last year and it was all about, you know, walking I don't know how many miles a day and eating the good food and drinking the good wine, and we did do some winery tours, which was incredible. But yeah, not that's where it's at, and I was even thinking at the time maybe I'll record an episode in Burgundy. Here I am in Bowen and I'm recording a podcast episode. Yeah, no, it didn't happen. It did not happen.

Mari:

I view more like a retirement thing where I could be like a consulting winemaker, where most of the time I'm just like riding a bicycle with like a floppy hat and the big sunglasses, maybe a scarf and a baguette and my little basket, you know Like. That's more like a retirement thing.

Ute:

I really like your romantic descriptions of this. This is sounding very good to me. I love it. I love it. That's beautiful. Well, actually I'm gonna make it two more questions because I really want to know, because I obviously need to try some of your wine, so I'm gonna have to place an order and, of your, give me one white and one red that you think I've gotta try, as someone who really loves reds and who likes dry whites.

Mari:

Okay, I would say of our reds. Right now we have a concrete fermented saurat.

Ute:

Okay.

Mari:

That we do a whole cluster in about a thousand gallon concrete tank. Yeah, and we call her Medusa and she's yeah, she's a hundred percent saurat and just has this beautiful, beautiful expression of fruit. We're getting all of the tannins from the stem inclusion and so it has this very kind of bright but bitey tannin to it. It's softening considerably. We just bottled this back in January but I think it's really gonna be a beautiful, beautiful wine to try and it does have that a little bit of that minerality to it which is fun.

Mari:

So I think the Medusa saurat right now is really fantastic. That one's really fun. And then, as far as the whites, if you want, like dry, crisp white, we actually just added a Sauvignon Blanc to our lineup. It's the first year we've made it. This is new fruit that we got last year from McNary Vineyard, which is out above the McNary Dam, out in Horse Heaven Hills, and that one. It was a really fun experiment. Even though things were sort of delayed last year, we still decided to pick at about 19 and a half bricks. We were really targeting a lower alcohol wine. That's an important folio. We really wanted it to be bright and citrusy. It was incredibly bright and citrusy, like abrasive acid when we picked it because we did pick it so early. So we decided to put half of it.

Mari:

half the juice went through secondary fermentation to kind of soften those acids and then we blended in a tiny bit of semi-on, and so you get this really lovely, almost tropical fruited Sauv Blanc with just almost this really lemon grape fruity pith kind of finish to it. So that one is about as bright and citrusy as we're going to get.

Ute:

All right, pacing in order. So are you DTC only, or can you be found in any, I don't know restaurants, stores or anything like that?

Mari:

Yeah, we do have some restaurant placements and we do partner with PCC as one of the retail outlets that we do work with. We are not really big enough to be in large places like a Whole Foods or a Costco or something like that. We only do about 3,600 cases, so still very small.

Ute:

Yeah.

Mari:

You can find our wines at any of the local PCCs, including the Sauvignon Blanc. That's been a big fun feature that we've done with them. We have a partnership with the Dukes restaurant too. We have a film for Opik Wine called Up River Red from Candy Mountain that we do with Dukes. That is actually making donations to a lot of our wild salmon conservancy. So, along with the Kings, the Wildfish Conservancy and Save Our Salmon. So if you want to feel good about buying some wine that we produce, we have a partnership with Dukes.

Ute:

I love it.

Mari:

They have wine all over their places, and then we also have just our regular kind of damsel lineup, obviously at our two tasting rooms. We do sell online, ship direct to consumer, and then we do have some fun restaurant partners in and around the Puget Sound area.

Ute:

OK, amazing. Well, thank you so much, listeners. You know what to do I know what. I'm going to do All right. So, as our final thing, I always ask my guests do you have any words of wisdom that you would like to share with women out there?

Mari:

Just say yes, I think is my advice, action is so much more powerful. I would just say get out there and do it, just say yes and take advantage of all of those opportunities, say yes.

Ute:

Right on, there you go. I love that. It's very simple and it's very much like what I pictured. You might say so and we don't know each other at all, might I add, but I think this last half hour has kind of given me a little bit of an understanding of who you are as a person. I would very much love to meet you in person someday, maybe when I make a trip up to Woodinville.

Mari:

Yes, please do visit.

Ute:

Yeah, for sure. We will, of course, have all of this information down in the show notes, as always. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I know that you have a harvest coming up and that it's going to be busy for you. So glad that you managed to squeeze me in and I hope you have a great day and I will chat with you soon. And with all of that, all I have left to say is, of course, post. Thank you.