JJ Williams of Kiona on Red Mountain & Washington’s One Voice

Our family planted the first vineyard on what would become Red Mountain in 1975. My grandparents (John and Ann) took a real leap of faith when they went in with their friends (Jim and Pat Holmes) to plant a vineyard in the middle of nowhere.

Today our operation is three generations in, and we farm over 270 acres in the AVA. We grow for about 60 of the top winemakers in the Pacific Northwest, as well as our own estate production of approximately 25,000 cases a year. My brother and I grew up in a double-wide trailer that had vines about ten steps from the front door. We don’t have investors, aren’t owned by a hedge fund, and don’t have debt. We’re the quintessential example of a modern American wine producer.

We’re a family farm that happens to run a winery. We own us, we operate us, we make our own decisions from start to finish. When people build a mental image of a family winery, we are it. Multiple generations live onsite. We’re responsible for the product from start to finish. We encapsulate the idea of the estate winery in every sense of the word.

My brother is the winemaker. He has a master’s in wine science and made wine all over the world, including stops in Bordeaux, Australia, Chile, South Africa, and New Zealand, before starting up here in 2019. No fancy consulting winemakers that fly in for a weekend, no outsourced expertise. We plant it, we grow it, we make it, and we are proud of it.

Because we grow high-end fruit for lots of other producers, Kiona is inherently a team player in the Washington wine scene: an increase in demand for Red Mountain wine (or Washington wine in general) is good for us. Success for Washington means more demand for grapes. It’s a simple equation.

Washington wine is delicious, competitive, and compelling, but when you hit the market, it feels like we have to work twice as hard to fight for awareness. That we’re all out here, rowing together in the same direction, telling the story, getting the message out in a collaborative way isn’t just novel, it’s a requirement.

Most important thing about Kiona: 50+ years and three generations of institutional knowledge to deliver compelling, estate-grown, Red Mountain wines with elegance, power, and geographical typicity. The most important thing about Washington: impeccable balance and drinkability across a wide array of styles, varieties, and price points. It’s the new frontier of American-grown wine.

The trademark Red Mountain fruit profile is dark, concentrated, and tannic, with pure fruit and powerful structure. It’s an embarrassment of riches, to be honest, but it does change how we manage ferments and élevage. A lot of modern winemaking techniques around the world emphasize extraction: winemakers are looking for more tannin, more color, more power. If we did that here, the wines would be unbearably dense and unenjoyable before 10+ years in the bottle. To that end, we’re constantly looking at ways to elevate elegance, and highlight the power and concentration inherent in the fruit without dialing it up to 11. At Kiona, that means hand-picking, mechanical and optical sorting, twice-daily pump-overs, gentler, larger-format barrels and longer timelines in the cellar, with healthy doses of older/neutral oak.

And we think about the end-consumer and downstream partners during every step of the process. In many ways, they’re right there in the blending room with us. I think the informational pipeline that includes the sellability of a specific product, the acceptance of a stylistic decision, feedback on the products, etc., isn’t filtered through a game of telephone. It’s us. We hear it.

We have a beautiful tasting facility that overlooks the Kiona Estate Vineyard. The crushpad is a 20-second walk from the tasting room, and the cellar is viewable through a window in the floor from the public tasting area. It’s a beautiful, rugged area that breaks the mental image of what Washington state is: this isn’t evergreen-covered mountainscapes, it’s arid shrub-steppe that gets six inches of precipitation per year and a landscape shaped by cataclysmic Ice Age flooding.

Awareness of Red Mountain as a world-class growing region.

Thank you!