'Romantic idea' becomes successful winery
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One evening when the fading sunlight was just so and the wine was just right, a romantic notion overcame Len Parris.
"I think I can do this," he recalls telling his wife, Lenita Jane, and three other couples while vacationing together at a hilltop villa southwest of Florence.
"Do what?" longtime friend Richard Corella asked.
"I think I could own a vineyard," said Parris, thinking of the acreage his father had owned, overlooking a bend in the Yakima River at Chandler Reach near Benton City.
That was in 1996. The following spring, Parris — whose careers have ranged from plumbing contractor to land developer to founder of the Seattle-area Jitters Coffee chain — fired up his D-8 Caterpillar and started moving dirt.
Today, he's the proprietor of Chandler Reach Estate Vineyards, growing 42 acres of red varietals and reaping medals for his limited-volume wines, which last year totaled 2,500 cases.
Soon he plans to break ground for a 7,000-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, case storage cellar and tasting room to accompany the 300-barrel wine cave he built last year.
It's a dream come true for Parris, 53. But it took him hard labor, bouts of self doubt, learning to work around the nightmares Mother Nature sometimes visits on wintering Washington vineyards, and a lot of help from friends to get him this far.
A romantic idea
"I didn't know anything about vines," he says, recalling that evening eight years earlier in Tuscany. "I was intrigued by the romance and the idea. I figured if I could capture that feeling for a customer for just a few hours, people will stop, and if the wine is good they'll come back again."
At Corella's suggestion, the two took a trip to California's Napa Valley to visit vineyards and wineries there as a reality check, before Parris committed to starting his own winery.
He then sought planting advice from people in the wine industry and from Washington State University's Prosser agricultural extension faculty. No one, he says, told him it was a bad idea.
Tackling tumbleweeds
In spring 1997, he logged the first of more than 250,000 miles worth of commutes to the sagebrush-covered site across the Cascade Mountains from his home in Woodinville to establish the winery.
A few weeks later, he and his vineyard consultant parted ways. This presented Parris with his first major hurdle: how to finish the job and do it right with what little knowledge he had at the time.
"My learning curve was vertical," he says. He recalled one frustrating, 100-degree afternoon working to install a plastic irrigation line when thoughts of hanging it up played on his mind.
"I had a very stern talking-to with myself," he says. "But it was one of those great Eastern Washington days, with a blue sky and puffs of clouds. I told myself I didn't owe anybody money, I'm doing what I wanted to do, so quit complaining."
It could have been a prayer, answered a short while later in the form of Bill den Hoed. The longtime Grandview-based grape grower had been driving past Chandler Reach each day to put a new vineyard into his property across the Columbia River from Wallula in Walla Walla County.
One day he stopped by to see what Parris was up to. It showed Parris how helpful competitors in Washington's wine industry can be with each other. The visits and free-flowing advice became a daily routine.
"Bill became my angel," Parris says. "I couldn't have done it without him."
Good flavors, good wines
Two years later, with his vines mature enough to bear a small crop, Parris decided he wanted to see what kinds of wines his merlot and cabernet sauvignon grapes could make.
Not having made wine before, he turned to veteran Yakima Valley vintner Ray Sandidge, who guided Parris and his crew through their first crush of enough fruit to make 230 cases.
"The wine was indeed drinkable and, in fact, not bad at all," Parris says. That gave him another idea: expanding the operation to an estate winery.
It "had a nice ring to it," he said. To boot, he added, Sandidge seemed to think the grapes were showing especially good flavors and were improving each year.
By the third year, the land was producing more grapes than Parris could use, and hobby and commercial vintners were lining up to buy them.
They continued to reorder — last year asking for more than the vineyard could yield — and Parris and Sandidge also kept making more wine, releasing their first commercial offerings from the 2000 vintage in January 2003.
Still, during the more than two years from harvest to release, Parris said he harbored apprehensions about whether he could sell the mountain of cases sitting in his warehouse.
His worries didn't start to fade until the two friends held Chandler Reach's first tasting at the Alexis Hotel for a Seattle Enological Society event. Society member Ed Rydbeck was pouring Parris' wine.
"He loved the wine and started introducing us around and telling people, 'You gotta taste these wines,' " Parris says. "It got very crowded around the table, and within an hour I couldn't get back to it."
Since then, Chandler Reach has amassed 85 sales accounts in stores, restaurants and wine shops.
As good as his six-year run has been, however, Mother Nature reminded him in January that wine growing is still agriculture. The bud-killing arctic blast that hit many Eastern Washington vineyards that month also took a toll on Chandler Reach.
He figures he'll have a full crop of cabernet franc this fall, but his cabernet sauvignon, merlot, syrah and sangiovese yields could be down 30 to 50 percent from last year.
"Everybody in the marketplace faces the same problems," he says, his romance with wine uncrushed but now seasoned with reality. "There are nightmare issues, but what business doesn't have them?"
Thomas P. Skeen: 509-525-3300 or e-mail at tskeen@ubnet.com.