Connoisseur of life: From film to wine, art-cinema founder follows his dreams

Those of us in our middle years usually start perfecting our hindsight, looking backward and wondering what would have happened if only we had taken that chance or followed that dream.

Not Randy Finley. The man known to a generation of moviegoers as a great movie-theater entrepreneur, and now to wine buffs as the owner of Mount Baker Vineyards and Winery, has spent his life reinventing himself and realizing his dreams. In 1969, he was a young kid in his 20s who fell in love with the magic of movies and opened The Movie House as the first in what became the Seven Gables Corp. — owning about 20 movie theaters from Seattle to Portland and Bremerton from 1970 to 1986.

When Finley found himself up against a group of movie distributors and theater chains that kept his theaters from getting choice box-office hits, he didn't throw up his hands and sell out, as many others might have done. He brought a landmark antitrust suit that took years of effort and cost millions in legal fees, and in 1987, he won big — a reported $9.5 million award.

When Finley sold the theater chain, he did what he'd long dreamed of doing: moving his family lock, stock and barrel to France, where he and his then wife and two sons lived for a year (1988) in the gorgeous environs of Lake Annecy in the French Alps.

Returning to this country in 1989, Finley was just getting started on an importing business when he traveled to Bellingham and his route took him past the Mount Baker Vineyards. A lifelong connoisseur of fine wines and great food, Finley "got totally hooked" and bought the winery in 1990.

Hands-on winemaker

When you see Finley standing at the door of his winery, grape clippers and a sheaf of fine-art wine labels in hand, you realize he hasn't changed much from the eager-eyed youngster who kick-started Seattle as a hip movie town more than three decades ago. His thick, curly hair has turned gray, but his enthusiasms run just as high as in the old movie days. He's a hands-on winemaker, clipping away grape leaves so the clusters of siegerrebe can get more sun, deciding how many tons of Yakima Valley grapes to buy, supervising all the details of the winemaking process from the crushing to the vivid images on the labels (many of them drawn from paintings by his wife, Pat Clark-Finley).

It's Finley, too, who hops on the ferry to show his wines to restaurants and groceries in such locations as the San Juan Islands, where he has a strong customer base. He bottles private-label wines for 26 restaurants now — including the Mitchelli and Lombardi chains, and Kaspar's in Queen Anne. With an output of 6,100 cases per year, Mount Baker isn't going to challenge the big boys of Washington wine, but it's still a respectable No. 24 in the list of some 300 Washington winemakers.

"We do a lot of oddball wines, ones that need point-of-sale selling," Finley explains as we traipse through the neatly weeded and mown vineyard on a search-and-destroy quest for powdery mildew. The six-plus acres of grapes just off the Mount Baker Highway, east of Bellingham, produce about 13 to 14 tons a year; Finley buys around 100 tons annually from the sunnier side of the mountains.

"It's hard to sell siegerrebe because nobody can pronounce it. (For the record: it's ZEE-geh-ray-beh.) Same problem with gewürztraminer. Some other winemakers and I joke about calling ourselves 'ABC': Anything But chardonnay/cabernet."

Specialty wines

This doesn't mean Mount Baker doesn't make both of those latter wines, along with a merlot that was ranked outstanding in this summer's issue of Wine Press Northwest. But the winery also offers such comparative rarities as chasselas (a dry white, originally from Alsace), Madeline Angevine (an aromatic white favored as an aperitif in Europe), Müller-Thurgau (a fragrant white), lemberger (a German red, believed to be a sport of pinot noir), syrah (a red from the Red Mountain area of the Columbia Basin) and a number of others (including several fruit and berry wines such as rhubarb, blackberry, blueberry, raspberry and plum).

Anyone planning to make big bucks from a small winery may be in for a few surprises. Only five growers are producing their own grapes on this side of the mountains — Lopez, Whidbey, Bainbridge and San Juan islands, and Mount Baker. It's difficult and costly. Finley jokes about the old French proverb: "How do you make a small fortune? Well, you start with a very large one."

But when you spend nearly $30,000 on netting to keep aggressive birds off your grapes, you have to sell a lot of wine to make up for it. A new filtration system and a new crusher with a special peristaltic pump adds to the winery's financial challenges. The labeling machine recently blew up. And then there's maintenance: During our interview, a frantic phone call comes from the cellars, where the air conditioning has suddenly gone on the fritz. The service truck is there before we leave; they know how crucial temperature is in wine storage.

Fortunately, Finley has plenty of time to devote to the winery; his two sons are grown (and one of them, Maitland, works for an Oregon winery and also helps out his dad at Mount Baker), and his current wife, Pat, maintains a residence in Sonoma, Calif., in order to share custody of her teenage son with her ex-husband. The Finleys get together every few weeks, in one state or the other. That long-distance marriage is only three years old, but the couple met back in their University of Washington days.

Love story

"I flunked freshman English three times" at the UW, remembers Finley, "because nobody at Olympia High School ever forced me to write a paper, and I didn't know how. Finally I hired a tutor, a lovely young woman named Pat. I was this tall guy with a beard down to my belly button, and I wore leather and drove a Harley hog. I pursued her for five years, but I think she was a little scared of me. I went off to Mexico, and she didn't, and we didn't see each other for 20 years."

Then a chance phone call from Pat brought the two of them together again. There are several Pats in Finley's family, and he jokes that he's unlikely to forget his wife's name. The best-known Pat Finley is Randy's sister, an actress who was for several years hostess of the daytime TV program "Seattle Today" (in addition to many stage and TV credits). She now lives in Sevrieres, near Annecy, France. Their father, Robert Finley, was a state Supreme Court justice from 1951 until his death in 1976.

Randy Finley says he's genuinely happy being out of the theaters and into the wine business.

"I've had a wonderful 15 years," he reflects.

"I've traveled; I've learned a whole new profession. I fell in love with the wine industry because a quality product will always find its way. And along the way I've met some amazing restaurateurs from Orcas Island to downtown Seattle. I found out that Christina Orchid, who owns the great Orcas restaurant Christina's, used to work for me selling movie tickets. Now we're both doing something completely different. That's the beauty of life: you can turn things around until you're doing something you really love."

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com.