John Bookwalter of J. Bookwalter Wines on Farming First and Washington’s One Voice

Yes. It’s all we can do: knock on doors, shake hands, kiss babies, right? There’s really no substitute, as near as we can tell.

If you’re building a building, it’s one brick at a time, as I always say. It just takes time. And then when you’re fighting the headwinds of an economy that is not good overall, it’s even more challenging. You just keep climbing. It’s about getting more points of distribution and better placements. Which is where you fit in and we know this. It’s a long game.

We’re seeing it firsthand in our restaurants. People are making choices. They are not eating out as much. They are not eating and drinking as much when they do go out. Gas here is more than five dollars a gallon and diesel even higher.

The core story for us is farming. My dad was one of the pioneer growers in Washington State. He moved here from California where he grew up in an agricultural family of ten generations from the East Coast to the Midwest and finally out west. He went to UC Davis, got a degree in pomology, which is a degree in fruits and nuts, and then started managing orchards and properties for other folks and did the same when he moved to Washington in 1976. He was charged with managing the largest contiguous planting of vinifera grapes at the time, which was Bacchus and Dionysus Vineyards. It’s one of the more picturesque vineyards in the state. So that was about 400-ish acres or so that he managed, you know, in the mid-’70s there when it was just a burgeoning industry and there wasn’t a lot of wineries.

There were fewer than 100 wineries in 1982. So, like any good entrepreneur, he left that secure job of managing properties and started our family winery in 1983. That puts us squarely in the position of being one of the oldest still family-owned and -run wineries in Washington, because so many of those before us have either retired or sold or just got out of the business. So, you know, we hold that moniker, good, bad, or indifferent.

I ended up getting my Bachelor of Science in Marketing, and then my career took me through Gallo and Coors and Pepsi. I was in sales. When I came back to WA in 1997, I offered myself to do winery sales, but my dad had a different plan. He said he didn’t want to make the wines anymore and that I needed to take that on as well.

Well, that redirected me immediately. Within two years, I took on the winemaking mantle of the winery. Dad had been making wines for 15 years but with the winery growing, he thought we needed more help. My dad knew I didn’t have all those skill sets to make wine and we brought in a woman named Zelma Long as our original consultant in 1999.

You could say that. My first vine-to-wine vintage with Zelma was in 2000. And I worked with her for almost nine years. I had never met anybody smarter, both, I say, left and right brain, super organized, creative, great communicator, a good teacher. I have binders literally full of the answers to my questions about winemaking because, you know, it was a degree I didn’t have, and I needed to understand it from top to bottom.

We were 90% sweet white wine and 10% red. Within three to four years, we had pivoted all the way to 90% red and 10% white. A huge diversion from where we were. That took different skill sets, investments in different vineyards and different winemaking techniques. We kind of reinvented the winery within the first four or five years, packaging and the styles of wines we were making, and all under the guidance of Zelma with me leading on the winemaking side and all sales, too, at the time.

Zelma went off to get a master’s degree in cultural, something that she wanted to pursue at UC Davis. And so, her time was being limited. And we just decided it was a good time to move on. I was able to partner up with a gentleman named Claude Gros, who became our second consultant for another six years.

Claude was out of the south of France, and he was on projects with Michel Rolland. And a lot of folks in those properties would say, well, Claude’s the real genius here. Claude was really a dynamic winemaker, you know, had his own vineyard, had his own winery, had his own lab. We built on our styles of red winemaking, lees aging, anaerobic winemaking, the size of barrels all changed, the types of barrels even. We were all French, but we started shifting cooperages and going to thicker staves and going to larger format barrels. We completely overhauled our red wine program and our extraction during fermentation. I like to say I have a very expensive secondary education. I had 15 years’ worth of expensive consultants. It would have been cheaper to go to UC Davis.

Cameron Parry is our current head winemaker. This will be his fourth vintage with us. He has a pedigree background and has worked vintages in South America and Napa. His family is from Walla Walla. His wife’s family is from Walla Walla. It was easy for him to make the move up here. He’s been an amazing addition, fine-tuning all our winemaking efforts, white and red. We’re probably split between 70% red and 30% white now in terms of our production.

Yeah, it’s insular. We’re a small industry here and the rising tide raises all. If you add us up, we’re 4% to 5% of the national wine consumption. We have to be collaborative if we want to be better as a group and individually, frankly. I firmly believe there’s safety in numbers in this.

I think what we bring to the party, if you will, is the age of our vines that we’ve been able to access because my dad managed the vineyards that we still source to this day. I’m still one of the largest clients at Bacchus and Dionysus, where I grew up in the late ’70s. We still source those vineyards. We’ve been working in the same blocks for over 40 years now. So we have a rhythm and we know these vineyards incredibly well. It’s just like anything, the more repetition, the more often you work with the same people or same vineyards or same coopers, you have a better understanding. When you put out a better product, a more consistent, good product, I think the age of the vines show up.

Yes. Our vines are mature, complete and balanced.

We’re farmers first. We’re hardworking people. We’re normal. We have an outdoor factory, and we have to adapt to that, every year. We are about transparency, heritage, and authenticity. This is straight up who we are. You want real people and real wines and real winemaking. We don’t fortify stuff. We don’t do crazy. And to a degree, that’s what distinguishes Washington wines from other wine regions. We can do it so naturally. We’re practically organic just falling out of bed. It just gives you an idea of the low pressure that we have from a winemaking and growing standpoint. We really do. We get to be pretty lazy winemakers, frankly, and that’s the goal. And funny enough, that was what Claude always said, we need to, in his French accent, we need to be lazy. If we can get it done in the vineyard, which we can, the job in the winery is easy.

Our job is to deliver on a package and a product and a price that makes sense for the customers that you interface with. And for us it’s a matter of exposure more than anything, right? We see you as a sales arm for us, and a lot of people out there, they may not know us.

We are here to educate. We are here for you and your buyers. We love sending out samples. We love getting our wines in front of people.

Thank you for your time and efforts.