Winemaking is central to the Hanford region

JJ Williams is the third-generation of his family in the wine business out of Red Mountain – one of the world’s premier vinicultural areas outside of Richland, Washington. But before the wine business, his family first put down roots in the Mid-Columbia region to work at Hanford. During the Manhattan Project, Williams’s great grandfather worked at the site, and then his grandfather worked on what’s called the Fast Flux Test Facility. It’s September now and crush is on – meaning that all the grapes are coming in to be pressed and fermented into wine at Kiona Vineyards. Williams recently got the distinction of being named in Wine Enthusiast’s 40 under 40. We sit down with him in our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with wine. JJ Williams is a general manager of his family’s winery at Red Mountain. It’s one of the world’s premier viticultural areas and it’s only about 20 minutes outside of Richland, Washington. The Williams family has run Kiona Winery now for about three generations – I should say exactly three generations. But if you go back four generations, JJ William’s great grandfather came to this region, like so many other people, to work at Hanford. JJ joins us now to talk about his family and wine making in Eastern Washington. It’s great to have you here.

JJ Williams: Thanks for having me, Dave. I appreciate it.

Miller: What did your great grandfather do when he got here?

Williams: So my great grandfather, John Rector, was recruited from the Midwest to work at the Manhattan Project. He didn’t know at the time what he was doing, but he was a material scientist and he was recruited to machine graphite rods. And he was working at a Remington factory in Kansas City. It was on a three-month contract, so he came out, finished that job and got hired again after the job was over, to work operations and maintenance in what we now know as the B Reactor.

Miller: The place that 80 years ago today went operational and we just heard a tour from that. We went on that tour yesterday.

So that was four generations back. And then your grandfather worked there too. What did he do?

Williams: Yeah. So my grandfather, John Williams, was born in the late-30s here in the Richland area and grew up seeing kind of atomic town USA. [He] got his degree at Washington State University and came to work in North Richland, Westinghouse, DuPont, that type of thing, again in material science.

Miller: How did your family go from material science and nuclear science in the Hanford world to making wine?

Williams: It was a bit of a serendipitous journey, I suppose. So, my grandfather John was working at Westinghouse and he got his desk pushed together with another guy’s desk. And this guy, Jim Holmes, was from Vallejo, California. And so my grandpa was kind of a beer drinking guy. Jim was a wine-fancy guy from California and they became friends. And from that friendship, they decided that they would become interested in wine together. I think that mostly means my grandpa was interested in drinking Jim’s collection. But that relationship blossomed into them both volunteering for and helping with the Horticultural Extension at the WSU Prosser branch.

Miller: How big a deal was grape growing and winemaking in this area in the late-60s, early-70s?

Williams: There really was no established wine industry here at the time. Jim and John together were working at what was basically an ongoing experiment to determine the commercial viability of growing wine grapes in Washington.

Miller: So let’s fast forward a little bit because I mentioned that this AVA, this established recognized area for growing grapes and making wine, that it’s known around the world now. What makes it special? What makes Red Mountain special?

Williams: Everything that makes Eastern Washington a really nice place to grow wine grapes … It’s dry from a precipitation perspective, but we have ample water resources. The soil is just right. We have lots of wind, we have lots of sunlight and ripening potential. All of that is more true on Red Mountain, it’s kind of supercharged. Just to quantify that a little bit, if you were to measure annual precipitation, where we are at on Red Mountain, the annual precip is about 6 inches per year. And at the Richland Airport, which is eight miles away, the way the bird flies, annual precipitation is closer to 8 to 9 inches. So that’s a 50% difference if you’re looking at even just a couple of miles.

So it’s really a microclimate. If you were to open the book and see all of the things that make an ideal grape growing location, Red Mountain checks a lot of those boxes.

Miller: Is there a hundreds-year-old wine making area that Red Mountain is most like, or is it actually truly its own place?

Williams: I think that a lot of wine industry folks want to compare one place to another.

Miller: I mean, when I’m in the Willamette Valley, they loved talking about how it’s like Burgundy and that was the way to sell it to sell people, who were maybe anxious or mistrustful of an American Pinot Noir. You have to compare it to Europe.

Williams: Yeah. So we’ve been growing wine grapes on Red Mountain now for 50 years. And it really is a one of one location. So we are known for Cabernet Sauvignon and things that blend into Cabernet Sauvignon. But we also have less common varieties planted. We have a little bit of Chenin Blanc. At Kiona, we’re famous for Lemberger. Grapes that … people that know, know and people that don’t know, have never heard of it before. But it’s really a diverse area if you’re talking about Washington state in general. But Red Mountain is specialized in high end red cultivars, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon.

Miller: What does it mean to you to be now, the third generation of your family in this business?

Williams: Yeah, we all still like each other. So that’s good. Grandma and grandpa get a lot of credit and deservedly so for taking a real risk. They had the gumption and the moxie to plant a vineyard in the middle of nowhere. There were no roads, there was no power, there was no water and they took this initial risk. The two families, the Holmes and the Williams, between the two families, there were seven kids at home, all high school age or younger at the time, no one would lend them money. And so they bankrolled this thing and it worked out by the skin of their teeth and they really deserve a lot of credit.

My parents came along and I actually grew up on Red Mountain. My brother and I both did. So before there was an established wine industry, they had decided to dedicate their careers to making Kiona into a viable business. So planting the vineyard was one thing, but building it into something that would actually generate enough income to make payroll and to grow gradually, nice linear growth over time – that’s something that my parents are largely responsible for.

Miller: And now something that you’re responsible for, right? I mean, as a kind of business operations side of this. Does it feel like a big weight on your shoulders?

Williams: It’s a big responsibility, certainly. There’s the drive to honor my grandparents’ work and my parents’ work before me, and we’re a legacy business, right? So we can operate it in a way where we don’t have to take moonshots anymore. We took that initial moonshot 50 years ago and now we have a reputation for quality and we’re selling wine all over the country.

Miller: I’m interested in that phrase “legacy business,” because I also noted that four years ago, Wine Enthusiast Magazine said that you bring a, quote, “Millennial sensibility to one of the state’s most important vineyards and wineries.” I mean, that could just be an easy sort of throwaway thing that a magazine writer writes. But do you think that you’re bringing something different generationally to this business?

Williams: Sure. There are not a lot of young people working in agriculture or farming nowadays. I don’t know if I could pull up actual statistics, but look around and what do you see? People who are working in agriculture are often baby boomers.

Miller: It’s the aging of the farm owners across the country and the consolidation of farms as well.

Williams: Right, right. So my brother and I … Tyler is my brother. He’s the winemaker, he made wine all over the world before he came to Kiona. And we make sure that we’re pushing things forward. You can’t be complacent. What has always worked can work going into the future, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way. So it’s important to not tread on any toes, obviously. Implicit in any change is the idea that how it was done before was not the way to do it. So I think it’s important to view the business as an evolution and not a revolution, right?

Miller: We’re talking in late September. My understanding is that crush is happening right now. What does crush mean?

Williams: Yeah, we’re in the middle of it right now. It’s kind of an all hands on deck time of year. So for those of you that don’t know, grapes are ready to harvest one time per year and that’s here in the fall. We spend all year in the vineyard making sure that the vines are healthy and they’re going to produce delicious high-end fruit that Red Mountain is known for. And then they all ripen in about a two month span.

At Kiona, we’re actually growing wine grapes not only for our own winery, but for about 60 other wineries in the Pacific Northwest. So if you’ve had Red Mountain wine before or even high end Washington State wine, there’s a decent chance that at Kiona, we are your farmer. So we’re coordinating logistics for our own winery and for everybody else’s winery and we have to make sure that pick requests and sugar levels and acid levels are just right for everyone. And we have a certain amount of picking bandwidth and tractor bandwidth and we have to make sure and communicate clearly, to make sure that things are happening when and how they need to. My brother and the winemaking team, they’re putting in truly long hours this time of year.

Miller: And you’re just talking on a radio show.

Williams: And I got to read my book before I came on for a little bit here in the mid-afternoon.

Miller: You’re welcome and also thank you very much.

Williams: Thank you.

Miller: JJ Williams is the general manager of Kiona Vineyards, which is about 20 minutes outside of Richland on Red Mountain.

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