Tri-Cities legacy wine families craft premium vintage to help feed those in need in NW

In 1978, Scott Williams was a kid doing grunt work for his dad, John, at the family’s fledgling vineyard.

It was on a dry, dusty hillside above the Yakima River Valley named for the reddish color of the cheatgrass when it bloomed there every spring.

That fall, the vineyard’s first crop of Cabernet Sauvignon was about to be harvested and delivered to a young winemaker from Preston Wine Cellars north of Pasco named Rob Griffin.

It marked the start of a 43-year friendship between the two families and their wine-making enterprises and the start of a legacy unmatched in the history of Washington wine.

Those wine grapes were the first Cabernet Sauvignon to be harvested on what’s now the famed Red Mountain American Viticultural Area.

And Griffin, who was graduated just a few years earlier from the prestigious University of California Davis wine program, took that first crop and made it into the first red wine from slopes then known only for sagebrush, rabbit brush and cheat grass.

Getting to that first vintage required plenty of dirty, grubby, hot and sweaty work.

John Williams later recalled that he and his partner, Jim Holmes, had set out a few years earlier to learn about grape growing by working with Walter Clore, the Washington State University grape researcher whose work provided the foundation for the state’s wine industry.

“We wanted to learn as much as we could,” the winery’s website quotes John Williams as saying, “And getting dirty seemed to be the best way of doing it.”

Scott jokes that “getting dirty” included a lot of child labor.

At times, he enlisted school classmates to help, who once broke into a chorus of the song, “Chain Gang,” as he urged them to finish up the day’s tasks despite a huge swarm of gnats that clogged their noses. They got to go home. But for Williams, there was always plenty more work.

“My Dad and his partner had read that you needed to plant two sticks (cuttings from a grape vine) for every one plant that would survive. So they planted two sticks” in each planting spot.

The two Hanford engineers took that concept as gospel, Scott added.

“The problem was that the numbers were about right, but usually both sticks in a planting either died or survived. We kids were given a posthole digger and told to move one of the survivors to fill the gaps.”

From its humble beginning in 1975, over the next four decades the Williams family operation would gradually grow and prosper so that the WIlliams and the Holmes families could split their operation and then John and his wife Ann could retire from active participation.

Scott, his wife Vicky and their two sons have continued to plan, develop and expand, gradually acquiring five Red Mountain vineyards that spread across 272 of the Red Mountain AVA’s 4,040 acres.a

Griffin, meanwhile, worked for Preston for a few more years, then served a stint with Hogue Cellars in Prosser.

In 1983, Griffin founded his own winery, Barnard Griffin, named for himself and his wife, Deborah Barnard.

In the decades since, his wines have regularly featured Red Mountain fruit from the Williams vineyards.

Looking back at that first vintage, Rob Griffin remembers the conventional wisdom was that Washington “was a first-class white wine region with limited prospects for reds.”

“My opinion was permanently changed in 1978 with the opportunity to crush the first crop from Kiona Vineyard on Red Mountain,” he recalls on Kiona’s website. “ … The first yielded wines (were) of tremendous depth and intensity, real diamonds in the rough and a foreshadowing of great things to come.”

On Aug. 3 to celebrate that first vintage, the families are announcing the Cabernet Sauvignon made from the 40th vintage of the same Cabernet grapes from Kiona Vineyards and Winery Estate Vineyards and made once again by Rob Griffin — this time with his daughter Megan Hughes — at what’s now the Barnard Griffin family winery in Richland.

This version is the brainchild of Scott’s son JJ, now Kiona’s general manager, and Megan, Barnard Griffin’s white wine maker. It was sparked by an idea JJ broached in an email to her about three years ago.

“All the credit goes to JJ,” she said, describing how they developed a plan to mark the legacy of their two families as key players in the founding of Washington’s modern wine industry.

“Our operations share a lot in common, and we’ve grown up in parallel over the decades,” JJ said. “That shared history is worth celebrating.”

Scott, JJ and his other son, Tyler, who took over winemaking duties at Kiona in 2019, made the concept a reality by growing a crop they believe has turned into a superb Cabernet Sauvignon crafted by Megan and Rob.

It’s a limited release of about 100 cases, with all proceeds from sales to going to Second Harvest to assist the 280 food pantries and meal sites in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho that help provide food assistance to families who struggle to put food on their tables every day.

“We want to tell our story,” Hughes said, “And help out the local community.”

The wine will be sold in three-bottle lots — $300 total.

The sale includes two tickets to a Sept. 25 party at Kiona as an added incentive to buy. The event will give buyers the opportunity to sample the wine, dine on food supplied by Bookwalter Winery’s food truck Nonfiction and by Stick+Stone Wood-Fired Pizza.

Those who don’t want to buy three bottles can buy a single bottle for $115, but that price doesn’t include the party.

Those who buy the wine will get a bit of Washington’s finest red wine grown and crafted by two families who combined have more than 100 years of grape-growing and winemaking experience.

This story was originally published August 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.