Avennia winery buys Tapteil Vineyard on Red Mountain (WA)

WINE TALK
1

I saw this in two places, first from Sean Sullivan’s email via WE, but also in an email from the winery directly.

"We are excited to announce that the team behind Avennia has acquired its first vineyard. Tapteil Vineyard, part of Red Mountain AVA, is one of the state’s oldest and most respected vineyards. Established in 1984 by Larry and Jane Pearson, Tapteil fruit has contributed to many highly rated wines throughout the years. Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are the dominant plantings and the vineyard also hosts the oldest plantings of Cabernet Franc on Red Mountain.

We are honored to make Tapteil our first estate vineyard and look forward to welcoming guests sometime in 2022. Details to come."

I’m pretty excited about this. They already make fantastic Bordeaux-style blends from various vineyards, but now they’ll be able to control the product from vine all the way through to bottle. I’m curious whether they’ll still sell fruit to wineries that have long used that vineyard. Cadence comes to mind.

2

My first question as well. While great for the purchaser, can strip away fruit sources from others. At least it is a local winery buying, not some big multi national like evening land.

3

Cheers to that!

4

Sean’s article said that Avennia will honor grape commitments for this year, and will sell some grapes in the future, but who knows what that will look like. Ben and Gaye from Cadence I think are on the road at the moment, so I don’t know if they will be part of the mix in the future. I do know that they are focusing more and more on primarily Cara Mia fruit.

5

Actually, Ben tells me that Cadence has now gone 100% to just using Cara Mia fruit (their own vineyard), so the sale won’t affect them at all.

6

Great info, John, thank you. I did a little search on CT. At this stage, for the 2018 vintage at least, only Cadence lists a Tapteil vineyard wine. 2017 shows one or two more (Tamarack Cellars), and 2016 shows a whole bunch using the fruit. So, it appears that the vineyard owners had been selling to fewer and fewer wineries in recent years. The sale now makes so much more sense.