Longtime Tri-Cities winery takes on Ste. Michelle facility, opens Richland tasting room

While many Washington wineries are retrenching and reconsidering their futures during a time when consumer demand for wine appears in decline, at least one family operation in the Horse Heaven Hills has launched an ambitious expansion plan.

McKinley Springs Winery and Horse Heaven Wine Co., owned by the Andrews family, a family whose farming roots reach back to the 1930s, have made two major changes to their operation this year as part of a years-long plan shepherded by Justin Andrews to expand its grape-growing and winemaking operations.

First, the family bought the former 14 Hands winery building in Prosser at the end of May from Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. Then, in mid-July, they opened a brand-new tasting room at 400 Bradley Blvd. in Richland adjacent to Longship Cellars and The Bradley restaurant.

The family has accumulated a formidable set of resources to implement its ambitious plans. In early 2023, they hired a 13-year veteran of the Ste. Michelle red winemaking team, Reid Klei of Kennewick, to take over a major share of their winemaking, joining Justin Andrews. While at Ste. Michelle, Klei regularly visited the Andrews plantings and got to know several family members.

Early this year, they added another industry veteran, Carlos Treviño, whose career in the business stretches back “34 or 35 years.” The Prosser native started at Hogue Cellars back to the early 1980s the Hogue family owned it.

“There is a new focus, including new labels, new wines, a new winemaker and now a new tasting room in Richland,” Justin says enthusiastically. He’s eager to keep the family’s vineyards and the McKinley Springs label relevant and inject a new energy as the family moves into the next generation.

Deep roots

His family previously has been best known as owners of Washington’s largest contiguous wine grape planting of about 2,600 acres.

The family originally bought 7,800 acres in the Horse Heaven Hills before World War II and didn’t start farming it until after the war because the army used it as a bombing range .

Since 1980, they have grown and then sold wine grapes from their diversified farming operation to scores of wineries that turned those grapes each year into award-winning wines.

As their grape plantings expanded and became renowned for their quality, the Andrews vineyards developed a customer portfolio that included several Ste. Michelle labels, including 14 Hands, H3, Columbia Crest and Ste. Michelle. The family also started making bulk wines sold as inexpensive by-the-glass pours in restaurants and bars and started their own small label, McKinley Springs Winery.

The family’s reinvented McKinley Springs wines will still be rooted in the toil and creativity of generations past, he said, but he aims to bring something new with his new team.

Klei, after working with Horse Heaven Hills grape growers for nearly two decades, said joining the Andrews family was really a homecoming. At Ste. Michelle, he had regularly spent long hours with family members checking vineyards as grape harvest approached in late summer, and well into the fall as various grape varieties ripened and were harvested.

And returning to the Prosser facility is a second homecoming for him. He first started his career working for Ste. Michelle there.

“The Andrews are very hands-on and always in the vineyards,” Klei said. “I got to know Rob Andrews really well, then Justin. The whole family is just really great people.”

Exceptional vineyards

Klei says he can count on some of the finest grapes from the Horse Heaven Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA), which stretches roughly 75 miles from Wallula Gap at its east end to its western end near Bickleton.

“I can be super selective,” he said, noting the three barrels of Cabernet Sauvignon he chose for the reserve tier is only 0.3% of the production of Cab from 2022. The wine was chosen from a great diversity of clones, vine ages and vineyard sites.

Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from the area gained national notice in 2009 when Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve from 2005 — made at least in part from Andrews family grapes — was named the year’s best red wine by Wine Spectator and awarded 95 points.

Those grapes were stunning examples of the quality the Horse Heaven Hills’ 17,000 acres of vineyards can produce. The resulting Cabernet displayed lush aromas and flavors of black cherry, blackberry, oak spice, black currant and chocolate, plus good acidity, firm tannins and a long, well-balanced finish. The wine carried its power, strength and finesse well past a decade.

Klei has always seen consistent quality from the Horse Heavens. The source of roughly 20% to 25% of Washington’s grapes, the AVA has since gained a reputation for also producing top-flight Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Malbec, Merlot, Syrah, Carménère, Grenache, Tempranillo, Viognier and many other varieties.

Richard Larsen, retired research winemaker for the Wine Science Center at Washington State University Tri-Cities, says Horse Heaven Hills grapes possess a number of characteristics that make them distinctive.

The area has “a sort of ‘Goldilocks’ climate,” he said, explaining that, because the hills are bordered on the south by broad reservoirs backed up along the Columbia River, temperature extremes are tempered a bit. The Columbia Gorge also channels coastal breezes inland straight up past Wallula Gap. Those winds moderate super-cold winter freezes and mitigate the “heat dome” effects observed in recent years.

The hills form the east-west backbone of Benton County and extend west across Klickitat and Yakima counties, peaking at Bickleton Ridge’s 4,327 feet.

They lead to the Simcoe Mountains, which extend west to the Cascades. Their underlying basalt ridges were formed millions of years ago from massive lava flows and eventually folded into cracked cliffs and outcrops that have spent millennia catching wind-blown sands from the Pacific and rocks, gravel and silt that Ice Age floods carried west down channels etched the lands over several thousand years.

Near the backbone of the ridges and just over the hill tops, Larsen said, are the best sites for Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc, whose popularity languished until recently. With the Horse Heavens and other cooler sites producing sensational wines with brilliant acidity and savory aromatics, plus the AVA’s dusty minerality.

He noted even such Rhone whites as Roussanne and Marsanne, which are often faulted for lacking acidity and aromatics, can develop surprising complexities in the Horse Heaven Hills.

A new chapter

Such qualities are what Klei aims to produce in all his wines, using upgraded facilities, more new oak barrels, new tanks and new fermenters. What the public will see most readily is the new tasting room on Bradley Boulevard.

Klei looks forward to helping the Andrews family through a time when everyone in the industry expects some difficult times because of a wine grape surplus nationwide.

He describes it as “a good time to pivot and readjust, a time to get creative, a time to maybe pull out some vines and varieties that have become less desirable or productive.”

Some plots will be replanted to expand on higher-demand varieties, such as Mourvèdre and Cabernet Franc, while other plots will be planted in new varieties, including Albariño, one of the state’s new all-star whites.

“The wine grape surplus has changed our mentality a bit,” says Andrews. “In the past we have relied almost exclusively on selling our grapes to other wineries and making just a little of our own wine. We are now trying to diversify the vineyard more and bring a better balance between grape sales and what we are producing of our own.”

“Ultimately, we wanted more control of our own destiny,” he said. “We have great grapes and can make great wine.” That pretty much became the motto of his generation of the family. And it also allows him to put to work skills learned at Walla Walla Community College’s winemaking and viticulture program, which he graduated from in 2007 after studying under the late Stan Clarke, a pivotal figure in the history of Washington wine.

The winemaking Justin has done over the past five years allowed him to hone those skills, with assistance from his family, including his dad, Rob. He started by crushing 11 tons of grapes for McKinley Springs in 2019 and “has basically been doubling that each year.”

Roughly 300 tons went into the program last year. With the addition of the Prosser production facility, Klei estimated production may reach 1,000 tons this year.

Klei said he believes the Prosser facility can do up to about 20,000 tons, which will leave plenty of room for expansion to serve the new tasting room and new wine club members they aim to attract.

“It feels like this location between George Washington Way and the Columbia River is the perfect place to expand. It feels like a gateway destination within the city.”

The family, with its generations of farming in the Horse Heavens, has the experience, skills and patience to know the changes won’t all be easy, nor made overnight.

“I think we have something special going on,” Justin concluded. “It’s been an exciting time full of growth and change, and I can’t wait to hit our goals in the future.”