Welcome to Kalama River Cellars. We provide industry best practices for winemaking with a focus on home winemaking and the goal to make the best quality possible. Starting with a passion for wine, our thirst for winemaking knowledge kicked off the journey to make better wine. We are thrilled to share our passion with you.
How we got started.
In the Spring of 2015, I retired from a Process Owner position at a manufacturing plant. With my wife Linda still working, what is a retired Chemical Engineer supposed to do? For the first several years, I sailed and received an American Sailing Association sailboat charter certification. However, I needed to find a capable deck hand to hoist the sails and swab the decks if we bought a sailboat. Lucky for me, Linda volunteered to help sanitize barrels, corks, and bottles if we made wine. I think she thought it might be easier to clean bottles, pumps, hoses, corks, tanks, barrels, and etc versus a sailboat. After a few harvests, we are not so sure.
First wine
Our newly formed wine team made a 2018 Chardonnay and Malbec with fruit from Lonesome Spring Ranch located in the Yakima Valley AVA. For the next harvest, a Cabernet Sauvignon was made using Red Mountain AVA grapes. For the following year, the fruit came from the UC Davis Research Center in the Oakville AVA. Since more experience with the same block was desired, another half ton of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes was purchased from the Oakville site in 2022. After twelve months of aging in a New French Oak barrel and a few additional years in the bottle, we’ll taste the results of our efforts and modify winemaking techniques if needed. Of course, the long aging doesn’t stop us from opening bottles along the way. Our friends and neighbors are the tasters and evaluators we trust the most and they work for peanuts – and charcuterie plates.
Continuing education
Even with microbiology training in college and years of microbiological control work in industrial settings, I didn’t feel prepared to tackle the potential challenges routinely experienced while making wine. In 2019, I enrolled in the UC Davis Winemaking certification program and completed it in 2021. Our winemaking education and journey has only just begun and there’s so much to learn. Within these pages, I’ll share successes and failures along our way, hopefully helping a few winemakers and tasters in their quest to make and/or taste great wine.