On Memorial Day weekend, Koi Pond Cellars opened a new tasting room at its winery in Ridgefield. This winery is a team effort. Wes Parker is the winemaker and accountant, and his wife, Michelle, is the assistant winemaker and runs the tasting room and marketing. Wes and Michelle started in the winemaking industry in their late teens in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
The Parkers built a winery in the Columbia Valley because of the unique qualities of the Columbia Valley AVA (American Viticultural Area). Wes explained, “The Willamette Valley can produce good wines, but only five good wines. You can produce a chardonnay, pinot noir, pinot gris, riesling, and a ros?. If you go south, then you can get into some older wines because of the heat. But, Washington, the Columbia Valley, you have cabernet, syrah, merlot, chardonnay, dolcetto, barbera, malbec, and that’s just the reds. So, right there are just more red wines than all the wine you can make in Willamette put together.”
Wes described their winemaking style, “We make the wine as organically as possible. We want to make sure we aren’t adding a lot of chemicals into the wine. We are into bigger and bolder wines. We are a traditional winery here, so you won’t see us blend and still call it 100 percent varietal. If we blend our wine, it will be on our geisha label.” Pure varietal wines are on their koi label (just look for the koi fish).
Koi Pond Cellars has two winemaker dinners a year. These dinners have limited seating and wine club members are given early registration. In August, they will host a Sip and Stroll event opened to the public. Michelle told me, “the field will be like a Saturday market. I have music booked. I have food booked. I have several vendors booked. I am trying to get the vendors diversified, so I was thinking about a petting zoo to encourage the whole family to come out.”
