Finley’s passion is on the vine
Mount Baker Winery comes of age

 

In his years as Seattle’s leading art film exhibitor, Randy Finley was known for his passion for movies. Today that passion is focused on his Mount Baker Vineyards near Deming and his love of wine making.

In Seattle, some three decades ago, Finley had a vision of a new kind of movie house for real film lovers. He bought a little art house in the University District and called it the Seven Gables Theater.

By the late 1980s, Seven Gables Theaters had become one of the country’s best small chains of art houses. Then Finley sold his theaters to Landmark Theaters and 13 years ago moved to Everson to make wine.

Since then he’s seen the total number of wineries in the state increase to 180. The last time he checked, a new winery was opening in the state every 15 days.

Mount Baker Vineyards is among a handful of small wineries operating in the Puget Sound area producing varieties of wine grapes more suited to the cooler, damper marine climate than those grown in Eastern Washington. Although the small group of determined Western Washington growers has shown that wine grapes can be produced here, the process is still not without challenge.

“The reasons to make different wines are as simple as changing seasons,” Finley said. “We grow six kinds of grapes. Some ripen in September, some in October, others in November. Our two early bloomers already have one-quarter-inch leaves, and they’ll have early blossoms about four weeks from now. But none of them will move if the temperature doesn’t get to and stay at 60 to 65 degrees. And if the shoots freeze, we’re toast.”

Operating a winery at the 350-foot altitude of Mt. Baker Winery isn’t a problem, Finley says. It’s the temperature fluctuations and unpredictable freezes, along with maple mold, which infects the grapes and causes a downward spiral that involves several steps in the food chain.

“Maple trees are factories producing mildew, and it’s everywhere,” Finley explained. “The white powder you see periodically on maple leaves flies off in the wind and lands on grapes, which hardens the skins. The skin cracks and breaks as the grape grows, then the juice seeps out. Then the bees walk in it and inject disease from their feet, and you get a bad grape.”

The Mount Baker Winery does not use herbicides or pesticides to protect grapes from airborne predators. Instead, they use sulfur, a non-metallic, naturally occurring chemical element. The only problem is that rain washes sulfur off of the fruit, so it has to be re-applied seven to eight times in a growing season. Grapes are sprayed with a fungicide only to protect them through the mildew period when maple trees cause the most problems.

When the grapes reach a composition of 12.5 percent sugar, they self-protect against mildew, but they must then cling to the vine until their sugar level reaches between 19 and 23 percent sugar. So sulfur again picks up the slack between 12.6 and 19-to-23 percent grape sugar levels.

Finley bought into the vineyard in 1990-91, after having given a loan to the owners in 1989. He decided to stick around, and counts the years by the number of seasonal workers, specifically the cellar masters he’s had — 13 in all.

“Some stay, some go,” Finley said. “Sometimes I have an onsite wine maker, sometimes a consultant. But now I have 13 years’ experience, so I have two professionals who run the cellar. You can make great wine with cellar masters if you have access to a good wine maker consultant.”

He said it’s like hiring a highly trained chef. If you want to be successful, a great chef is going to want to run the show himself. In addition to himself and the cellar masters, he has a technical person, and a quality control staff member who happens to be a chemist. She is also in charge of production.

“You’ve got to be really well organized with the production,” Finley says. “You need equipment, bottles, tops, testing equipment, boxes. Farming is one thing, but nothing is safe until the product is in the bottle and the cork goes in.”

The Mount Baker Winery consists of six acres growing six varietals, one acre each of chasselas, madeleine angevine, muller-thurgau, pinot noir, pinot gris and siegerrebe. In a good year, Finley produces 200-300 cases of each variety, and could harvest between 18-20 tons of grapes. He harvested 12 tons of grapes last year.

“It was a strange year because we had a lot of 70-degree days, but no stretch of 80-degree days,” he said. “So plenty of nice-looking days, but not enough warmth to get some of the varietals ripe. We had to let them rot, they only reached 16 percent sugar.”

He also tries to buy 100 to 110 tons of grapes from the eastside of the Cascades, where the “heat-seeking” grapes grow. They need much higher temperatures in the summer to get ripe. He likens them to those grown in the Napa and Sonoma valleys of California, but to get the real inside scoop on regional grapes here, in California, or around the world, you’ll have to talk to him and other wine experts yourself.

Washington State compares with California,” Finley states. “We don’t have the pest problems that are prevalent in California, so we can more easily avoid the use of pesticides. Then again, they don’t have powdery mildew, because 105 degrees of temperature kills it; and they don’t have maple trees.”

Mount Baker Winery’s prices range from $8 to $24 a bottle. He saved the last 40 cases of his 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon, which are currently deep-cellared for future sale.

“I hope to sell those in five to six years for about $35 a bottle; and now I can move the 1999 bottles down to the cellar, too,” he said.

“I’m now making the wines I had in mind when I bought this place, and we’re just starting to build a solid cellar.”

On the harvest side, Finley’s grapes become ripe, as he says, “so few and far between, we use ourselves and friends to do the picking.” October and November are the busy times, and the most labor intensive.

Most of the year he runs the operation with six people, but may need between eight and 14 during the busy months.

In any case, for Finley, it’s a labor of love. “The Robert Mondavis are few and far between,” he says, “and you won’t see those types of wineries sprout up very much anymore.

“I was so in love with wine, and the romance of it, so I didn’t stand a chance when I saw that cute old man and that adorable winery…every year he’d convince me to get more involved,” Finley reminisced.

“They say if you start with a really large winery and handle it just right, it’ll be small in no time.

“Maybe if I’d stuck with a barrel of wine in my garage, I’d be happier man today. But it’s a passion.”