THE HARDEST-WORKING MAN IN WINE! INTERVIEW WITH BRAD BINKO OF ETERNAL WINE
6/2/2017
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Brad Binko only just started his winery, Eternal Wines in 2014, but he already has a second label, Drink Washington State Wines. Stop by his tasting room in downtown Walla Walla at 9 South 1st Avenue (just a couple of doors down from Sweet Basil Pizza) to taste his dazzling array of whites and reds. For those in the Tri-Cities, Brad will be doing a Meet the Winemaker event at 3 Eyed Fish Wine Bar on Wednesday April 26th. Brad was kind enough to sit down with us in April for an in-depth interview.
WALLA WALLA WINE LIMO: Tell us a little about your background. BRAD BINKO: I was born and raised in Buffalo. It’s a great place to be from. I’ve had some of the best BBQ I’ve ever tasted in Buffalo and it spoiled me for chicken wings going forward. Great |
beers too. My first job was bartending at the Buffalo airport; that was cool as I got to know a lot of new people and got some great experience in the beverage industry. beers too. My first job was bartending at the Buffalo airport; that was cool as I got to know a lot of new people and got some great experience in the beverage industry.
WWWL: You lived in Boston for a time, right?
BRAD: Yes, I lived there while I was going to Northeastern. Lived right around the corner from Fenway Park. That was great. I truly enjoyed living in a big city and taking the subway everywhere. Buffalo’s a city, but not a big city like Boston. I grew up a Red Sox and Celtics fan, so it was fun for me to be in that environment.
WWWL: At some point you relocated to South Carolina.
BRAD: Yes, Charleston, South Carolina. I basically headed south as far as I could until I ran into palm trees. So I stopped in Charleston. Loved it there, it’s gorgeous; that’s where I bought my first house and started putting down some roots. That’s where I really started working in fine dining and began to appreciate wine.
WWWL: Where were you working?
BRAD: I was working on Q Island, it’s a sanctuary. It was brand new, I worked there when it first opened. It was a 5-star, 4-diamond resort, so uber fancy. It was cool to meet the clientele and to work with such an incredible wine list. I’d never worked anywhere before where the wine list had bottles over $1,000 on it! You grew up on your wine knowledge pretty fast working there – you really had to. The guests were passionate about wine and they knew what they were buying, so you had to know what they were buying – especially if you’re going to charge a thousand dollars for it (laughs). For a time there I was bartending at the pool bar durijng the day and then at night bartending at the fine dining restaurant. The clientele there was amazing. I met Bill Gates there and the Prince of Saudi Arabia, just some really interesting people that I would probably never cross paths with.
WWWL: So how did you get exposed to wine in the first place?
BRAD: My dad has a pretty big wine cellar, so he’s the one who got me into it initially. When I bought my house in Charleston, he came down and set me up with 30 bottles from Total Wine. He got me a broad collection to start off with so I could learn about the different wines and learn what I liked. I still have two of those bottles today!
WWWL: At some point you decided to take the Sommelier exam.
BRAD: Yes, I was trying to figure out my next step and decided to go in that direction. I had a lot of free time to learn and study about wine because I had torn my ACL [playing basketball. I did a lot of research, spending a month on each country. I’d watch tourism videos to get a better understanding of what these different countries were like – I feel like you can’t understand a country’s wine if you don’t understand its culture and climate.
WWWL: So, in the back of your mind were you always thinking about making wine some day?
BRAD:: It’s always been there. My stepmom wanted me to go to college for winemaking right out of high school, so it’s definitely always been a thought.
WWWL: Did you have much in the way of formal wine education before you made your first wine?
BRAD: Not really other than an introductory class at the Court of Master Sommeliers. I started making wine in 2014, but I didn’t graduate from the Enology and Viticulture program at the community college here until last year.
WWWL: So you were making wine well before you actually finished the program?
BRAD: I was, I was. It was very interesting; a lot of times I’d go to class and they were teaching something that I had already done or something that I had to teach myself because I was probably the only person there who was actually making wine at a production level. I had a lot of help getting started. I worked for Victor De La Luz [Walla Faces] and he was great. I could ask him questions and he’d give me the background and educate me about everything I wanted to know.
WWWL: So, how’d you end up in Walla Walla from South Carolina?
BRAD: There’s not a lot of places that offer this degree, so you’re looking at pretty much California, Oregon and Washington. I didn’t want to live in California, so it was gonna be the Pacific Northwest.
I looked at schools in both states and I visited WSU and WWCC here and I fell in love with this spot here, Walla Walla. It was more hands on, it was more production, it was more what I was looking for.
WWWL: Tell us about the first wine you made.
BRAD: The first one was the 2014 Rocketman red. It got 89 points at Wine Enthusiast, so I was pretty damn happy about that!
WWWL: So how does that work? You call them up? You send them wine? You have a PR person call them?
BRAD: I am the PR person! Basically you get the wines out there and get people talking about your wines. I actually got a message that Wine Enthusiast wanted me to submit my wines — and when Wine Enthusiast asks you to submit your wines, you usually submit them (laughs)!
WWWL: You weren’t necessarily planning on submitting the wine to them, were you?
BRAD BINKO: No, I wasn’t.
WWWL: So you just got this message out of the blue from Wine Enthusiast. Obviously they’d heard the buzz that’s been building about your wine. I’m assuming it was Sean Sullivan at Enthusiast?
BRAD: Yes, it was.
WWWL: You’ve made a very ambitious undertaking, being a relatively new winery coming out with two distinctly different brands at the same time, the Eternal Wines brand and your Drink Washington State brand. Tell us what the two labels are all about and what the reason was to have two different labels.
BRAD: Yes, it is ambitious – or maybe its stupid (laughs). The reason to have two different labels is because there’s two different endpoints, two different goals.
WWWL: And it’s working. You’re selling the wine and you’re getting a lot of critical acclaim about your wines.
BRAD: It is working. There’s definitely a symbiotic relationship between the labels for sure. Eternal is single vineyard, single varietal, small production. Typically what I do is I buy a bunch of grapes from one of the vineyards I work with it and I make that into its own bottling. We’re usually only doing 42 cases of the single varietal wines. The best score I ever got on one of my wine was a 91 and that was on a Viognier that I only made 22 cases of – that’s only one barrel!
That’s what Eternal is all about, but it couldn’t survive by itself; there’s just not enough wine being produced on that side. But then we do the Drink Washington State wines, which allows me to do blends. I do more Bordeaux varietals on that side, whereas the Eternal wine is mostly Rhone varietals. The Drink Washington State wines are meant to be drunk now – don’t save those bottles!
WWWL: The Drink Washington State wines are all at the same price point, right?
BRAD: Yes, the whites are all $19 and the reds are all $26. It’s just pick your favorite, buy it, don’t feel bad about opening it the next day.
WWWL: Whereas the Eternal wines are meant to be laid down for a few years.
BRAD: A couple of years at least. Heck, the Port I recently made [it sold out very quickly] could last 50-100 years!
WWWL: As far as I know you and Zerba are the only ones making Port in the Walla Walla Valley!
BRAD: I think that’s right. And I’m pretty sure the Port I’m making is made differently than anybody’s ever made Port!
WWWL: Where are the grapes from your Port from and why Port?
BRAD: My Port is made 100% from Syrah grapes. The 2015 was from Morrison Lane Vineyard and the 2016 [due out this fall] is from the Patina Vineyard, right next door {to Morrison Lane]. Why Port? I like to make all wines. As a Sommelier I like to make wines that I can plan a whole dinner around. You start with the sparkling, which we make, move on to the whites, then the reds and finish with Port. Nobody’s focusing here on Port, nobody’s focusing here on sparkling and I’m doing both.
WWWL: That’s awesome. I think you’ve done more unique things with your wines already than some wineries that have been around five or ten years!
BRAD: That’s what I’m trying to do, be a bit out of the ordinary. I take some chances at times, take a bit of a risk.
WWWL: Your tasting room is located now right downtown on 1st Avenue, but you had a tasting room in Walla Walla before that, right?
BRAD: Yes, it was out by the airport – across the street from the incubator wineries, sharing with another winery. It opened in May 2016 and it was only really open for four months or so. It was too small and I really wanted to be downtown, in the middle of everything. I had the opportunity to move into the spot downtown because Victor Palencia, who had the space downtown, came and visited me at the airport and said he thought I’d be better served being downtown [and he was looking to move from downtown]. So he just let me take over the space instead of putting it on the open market. He was opening something in Tri-Cities and he’s still got a presence out by the airport, so he didn't feel like he needed two tasting rooms in Walla Walla.
WWWL: Your downtown spot is great because people will discover you that weren’t necessarily looking for you. They might stop for lunch at Sweet Basil Pizza and see you a couple of doors down – and of course you’ll wave them in!
BRAD: It is a great spot. I like the people walking by, it feels like life is happening just outside my door, which wasn’t happening out at the airport.
WWWL: What’s the experience like at your tasting room?
BRAD: Obviously it’s about drinking wine and having people discover the wines, but I also try to focus on education in the tasting room. As a sommelier and as a student of wine and a winemaker, I realize that most of the people coming in won’t have that kind of knowledge about wine and I try to find a common ground with them. Like if someone’s really more of a beer person, I’ll talk to them about beer and if they understand the difference between Coors Light and Deschutes IPA, for example, and then relate that to the wine. I want people to leave my tasting room not only knowing that they’ve tasted some good wine, but also feeling like they’ve learned a bit more about wine.
WWWL: Can you talk about the unique community among winemakers and the wineries here in Walla Walla?
BRAD BINKO: It’s unreal. It’s amazing. So supportive. It’s awesome. It’s unlike any other community ever. It really is. If you need something or you have a question, you can ask people and they’ll give you an honest answer. That just doesn’t happen in other communities. You don’t see the CEO of McDonalds asking the CEO of Burger King how to make burgers (laughs).
WWWL: And it doesn’t seem like they have that kind of community in other wine regions. People elsewhere would be like, “He’s my competitor, I can’t help him!”
BRAD: That’s because it’s not competitive in a cutthroat kind of way. Sure, there’s a certain competitiveness which comes with wanting to make the best wine.
WWWL: You of course want to get better scores, better reviews than your buddies.
BRAD: Sure, but if you’re making good wine, I’ll support you. I don’t care if the wine got an 88 or a 94. It doesn’t matter to me. If you’re a good person and you’re making good wine I’ll support it.
WWWL: Talk about the wines you like to drink when you’re not at work. What’s in your wine cellar?
BRAD: Most of my cellar is early 2000s Napa Cabs. That’s kind of what I’ve been getting into lately. They don’t suck (laughs).
WWWL: What producers?
BRAD: I’m a big fan of Arrowood. Nickel and Nickel is good. I like the Robert Sinskey wines. Old school producer, those are good values. I’ve also got a couple of old ones from Dominus, a couple hundred pointers that I’m sitting on, waiting for the right time to open them.
WWWL: 100 pointers!
BRAD: 100 point wines, yes. I mean, what does 100 point wine taste like?
WWWL: Well, that’s a perfect score, so the wine should be perfect I guess! My problem with wines over a certain price point is that there’s just too much room to be disappointed. For that kind of money I want the wine to wash my car, do the dishes…the expectations are so high.
BRAD: Sure, the wine should also give you a massage and put you to bed! I hear ya.
WWWL: Tell us about some of your current releases. They’re not distributed, right?
BRAD: I’m self-distributed actually. That means I’m making every contact myself, hand-delivering every case of wine personally. That’s what keeps me on the road so often. Trips to Seattle, Spokane and all over the state.
WWWL: You’re the hardest working guy in wine!
BRAD: (laughs) I’ll take that. Maybe I should start marketing that
catchphrase! (laughs).
WWWL: So with the self-distribution it’s not exactly what one would call “widely distributed” I suppose.
BRAD: True. There’s literally like a place in Renton and a place in Everett and a place in Kent that you can find my wine.
WWWL: You’ve got a white wine, a Roussanne, that sells for $40! That’s pretty unique. You don’t see many whites in that price range. But it’s selling well.
BRAD: The Roussanne does well. It got great scores, it’s won awards. It’s been a good wine for me. It sells mostly at the tasting room. I babysat that wine for two years – nobody babysits a white wine for two years! That just doesn’t happen. I get excited doing different things, trying new things.
WWWL:So when you say you “babysat” the wine you mean that you refined it, made changes to it to get it to where it’s how you wanted it?
BRAD: That’s right. It spent two years in the barrel. Every month I top my wines, sometimes every two weeks in the offseason. When I do that, I stir the barrels and the lees get stirred up. It creates a bigger, broader mouth feel.
WWWL: And eventually it tasted like you had envisioned?
BRAD: It’s a fun transformation, it really is. At first it tastes vibrant and fresh and spicy, kind a racy wine. And over time it mellows and it gets these big broad, nutty characteristics. “Oh hello, you’re so much more than I thought you could be”. It’s a fun wine.
WWWL: That’s a good story. Have you had a wine where you made a lot of changes and no matter what you did, you just couldn’t get it right?
BRAD: For sure. I had that happen with my Red Mountain Cab. It was a wine that I had a battle with I guess. It was the most expensive fruit I had bought and I had a vision for what it could be. But it just wasn’t turning out like that by itself, so the fruit ended up going into my Rocketman Red. It ended up working out fine, but I had to blend it with some other things. So the Rocketman Red ended up being a better value than I had planned, but that’s OK.
WWWL: With all the wines you make, you’re sourcing grapes from many many vineyards. What kind of research goes into deciding where you’re gonna buy your grapes from?
BRAD: Honestly, it’s a lot of tasting wine. It’s about tasting wine from that wineyard, cause if you taste wine from that vineyard and it’s big and bold and tannic and you’re trying to make a fruit-forward “finesse wine” maybe you’re looking in the wrong place (laughs). It’s just not gonna work. But seriously, you’ve gotta taste the wine, you’ve gotta taste the soil.
WWWL: It helps that you’ve got a sophisticated palette, you’ve tasted a lot of really good wine.
BRAD: Definitely. That helps a lot. Sometimes I’ll brainstorm, taste the wine and if I know who made it, I might get in touch and talk to them and ask them about the grapes from certain years, find out what they liked and what they didn’t like. I’ll try to find out as much as I can before I start making the wine because once you start making the wine it’s on a path and you want it to stay on that path as long as possible.
WWW: So when you’re talking to the people from a particular vineyard and they’re asking a certain price for their grapes, how do you know that that’s a good value? How did you learn whether or not buying particular grapes is a good deal?
BRAD: Experience and tasting the wine. It really comes down to tasting the wine from winemakers you trust, ones that you respect and you can understand what they’re doing. It all really comes down to tasting the wine. It’s as simple as that. If you’re tasting a lot of Red Mountain Cabernet and it’s tasting really good to you, well guess what, don’t go to Snipes Mountain for Cabernet, go to Red Mountain!
WWWL: Tell us about your Carmenere.
BRAD: It’s a fun wine. I had noticed that people in Walla Walla were really loving Carmenere and loving different varietals. One of the most unique things about Walla Walla is that t’s not just about Cab, Merlot and Syrah. Those are great, but the wine buyers and drinkers in Walla Walla want something different, they want to taste something new. Carmenere is a great grape. It’s food-friendly and it’s got a great story behind it. It does well in Walla Walla. There’s just a handful of producers that are bottling single vineyard Carmenere in Walla Walla. I’m enjoying seeing that and I wanted to be part of it.
WWWL: The problem I’ve always had with Carmernere is that they’re all $45+ and to me it’s not such an approachable wine right off the bat. It seems like more of an acquired taste – and it’s hard to acquire that taste when the entry-level wines of that varietal are that expensive. But your Drink Washington State Carmenere is just $26. At that price point, it was a lot easier for me to develop a taste for it.
BRAD: That’s cool. That’s the great thing about the Drink Washington State wines. Even though it’s bigger production, I’m gonna do some smaller lots of different things and people like that. I like that. I don’t think I’d be happy if I didn’t make each wine varietal at least once.
WWWL: There’s an interesting story behind your Rocketman Red. You picked all that fruit yourself, right?
BRAD: Yes, me and a few buddies from the EV program went out and picked the fruit ourselves. Typically I’d buy the fruit and I’d pick it up after it had already been picked. But all the grapes that went into that bottling of the Rocketman Red, we went out to the vineyards and picked ourselves.
WWWL: So how would you know which grapes to pick and which ones not to pick?
BRAD: That’s something you learn in the wine program. We were taught what to pick and what not to pick, how to identify diseases and such. Going out and picking the grapes ourselves was not only fun, but part of the learning curve.
WWWL: Kind of like a class trip!
BRAD: (laughs) Yup. We went up to Gamache Vineyard, about an hour and a half from here and loaded up three truckloads.
WWWL: So there’s no wine you won’t make?
BRAD: Well…
WWWL: So when’s your White Zinfandel coming out?
BRAD: I can guarantee I won’t be making White Zinfandel! Barbera and Pinot Grigio are two others I probably won’t make. Too acidy to me. But you never know. I had a customer once who all he drank was White Zinfandel. I tried as hard as I could to get him into other wines, whites, reds, everything, but it didn’t work. That’s when I realized that some people just don’t want to be saved!
WWWL: You lived in Boston for a time, right?
BRAD: Yes, I lived there while I was going to Northeastern. Lived right around the corner from Fenway Park. That was great. I truly enjoyed living in a big city and taking the subway everywhere. Buffalo’s a city, but not a big city like Boston. I grew up a Red Sox and Celtics fan, so it was fun for me to be in that environment.
WWWL: At some point you relocated to South Carolina.
BRAD: Yes, Charleston, South Carolina. I basically headed south as far as I could until I ran into palm trees. So I stopped in Charleston. Loved it there, it’s gorgeous; that’s where I bought my first house and started putting down some roots. That’s where I really started working in fine dining and began to appreciate wine.
WWWL: Where were you working?
BRAD: I was working on Q Island, it’s a sanctuary. It was brand new, I worked there when it first opened. It was a 5-star, 4-diamond resort, so uber fancy. It was cool to meet the clientele and to work with such an incredible wine list. I’d never worked anywhere before where the wine list had bottles over $1,000 on it! You grew up on your wine knowledge pretty fast working there – you really had to. The guests were passionate about wine and they knew what they were buying, so you had to know what they were buying – especially if you’re going to charge a thousand dollars for it (laughs). For a time there I was bartending at the pool bar durijng the day and then at night bartending at the fine dining restaurant. The clientele there was amazing. I met Bill Gates there and the Prince of Saudi Arabia, just some really interesting people that I would probably never cross paths with.
WWWL: So how did you get exposed to wine in the first place?
BRAD: My dad has a pretty big wine cellar, so he’s the one who got me into it initially. When I bought my house in Charleston, he came down and set me up with 30 bottles from Total Wine. He got me a broad collection to start off with so I could learn about the different wines and learn what I liked. I still have two of those bottles today!
WWWL: At some point you decided to take the Sommelier exam.
BRAD: Yes, I was trying to figure out my next step and decided to go in that direction. I had a lot of free time to learn and study about wine because I had torn my ACL [playing basketball. I did a lot of research, spending a month on each country. I’d watch tourism videos to get a better understanding of what these different countries were like – I feel like you can’t understand a country’s wine if you don’t understand its culture and climate.
WWWL: So, in the back of your mind were you always thinking about making wine some day?
BRAD:: It’s always been there. My stepmom wanted me to go to college for winemaking right out of high school, so it’s definitely always been a thought.
WWWL: Did you have much in the way of formal wine education before you made your first wine?
BRAD: Not really other than an introductory class at the Court of Master Sommeliers. I started making wine in 2014, but I didn’t graduate from the Enology and Viticulture program at the community college here until last year.
WWWL: So you were making wine well before you actually finished the program?
BRAD: I was, I was. It was very interesting; a lot of times I’d go to class and they were teaching something that I had already done or something that I had to teach myself because I was probably the only person there who was actually making wine at a production level. I had a lot of help getting started. I worked for Victor De La Luz [Walla Faces] and he was great. I could ask him questions and he’d give me the background and educate me about everything I wanted to know.
WWWL: So, how’d you end up in Walla Walla from South Carolina?
BRAD: There’s not a lot of places that offer this degree, so you’re looking at pretty much California, Oregon and Washington. I didn’t want to live in California, so it was gonna be the Pacific Northwest.
I looked at schools in both states and I visited WSU and WWCC here and I fell in love with this spot here, Walla Walla. It was more hands on, it was more production, it was more what I was looking for.
WWWL: Tell us about the first wine you made.
BRAD: The first one was the 2014 Rocketman red. It got 89 points at Wine Enthusiast, so I was pretty damn happy about that!
WWWL: So how does that work? You call them up? You send them wine? You have a PR person call them?
BRAD: I am the PR person! Basically you get the wines out there and get people talking about your wines. I actually got a message that Wine Enthusiast wanted me to submit my wines — and when Wine Enthusiast asks you to submit your wines, you usually submit them (laughs)!
WWWL: You weren’t necessarily planning on submitting the wine to them, were you?
BRAD BINKO: No, I wasn’t.
WWWL: So you just got this message out of the blue from Wine Enthusiast. Obviously they’d heard the buzz that’s been building about your wine. I’m assuming it was Sean Sullivan at Enthusiast?
BRAD: Yes, it was.
WWWL: You’ve made a very ambitious undertaking, being a relatively new winery coming out with two distinctly different brands at the same time, the Eternal Wines brand and your Drink Washington State brand. Tell us what the two labels are all about and what the reason was to have two different labels.
BRAD: Yes, it is ambitious – or maybe its stupid (laughs). The reason to have two different labels is because there’s two different endpoints, two different goals.
WWWL: And it’s working. You’re selling the wine and you’re getting a lot of critical acclaim about your wines.
BRAD: It is working. There’s definitely a symbiotic relationship between the labels for sure. Eternal is single vineyard, single varietal, small production. Typically what I do is I buy a bunch of grapes from one of the vineyards I work with it and I make that into its own bottling. We’re usually only doing 42 cases of the single varietal wines. The best score I ever got on one of my wine was a 91 and that was on a Viognier that I only made 22 cases of – that’s only one barrel!
That’s what Eternal is all about, but it couldn’t survive by itself; there’s just not enough wine being produced on that side. But then we do the Drink Washington State wines, which allows me to do blends. I do more Bordeaux varietals on that side, whereas the Eternal wine is mostly Rhone varietals. The Drink Washington State wines are meant to be drunk now – don’t save those bottles!
WWWL: The Drink Washington State wines are all at the same price point, right?
BRAD: Yes, the whites are all $19 and the reds are all $26. It’s just pick your favorite, buy it, don’t feel bad about opening it the next day.
WWWL: Whereas the Eternal wines are meant to be laid down for a few years.
BRAD: A couple of years at least. Heck, the Port I recently made [it sold out very quickly] could last 50-100 years!
WWWL: As far as I know you and Zerba are the only ones making Port in the Walla Walla Valley!
BRAD: I think that’s right. And I’m pretty sure the Port I’m making is made differently than anybody’s ever made Port!
WWWL: Where are the grapes from your Port from and why Port?
BRAD: My Port is made 100% from Syrah grapes. The 2015 was from Morrison Lane Vineyard and the 2016 [due out this fall] is from the Patina Vineyard, right next door {to Morrison Lane]. Why Port? I like to make all wines. As a Sommelier I like to make wines that I can plan a whole dinner around. You start with the sparkling, which we make, move on to the whites, then the reds and finish with Port. Nobody’s focusing here on Port, nobody’s focusing here on sparkling and I’m doing both.
WWWL: That’s awesome. I think you’ve done more unique things with your wines already than some wineries that have been around five or ten years!
BRAD: That’s what I’m trying to do, be a bit out of the ordinary. I take some chances at times, take a bit of a risk.
WWWL: Your tasting room is located now right downtown on 1st Avenue, but you had a tasting room in Walla Walla before that, right?
BRAD: Yes, it was out by the airport – across the street from the incubator wineries, sharing with another winery. It opened in May 2016 and it was only really open for four months or so. It was too small and I really wanted to be downtown, in the middle of everything. I had the opportunity to move into the spot downtown because Victor Palencia, who had the space downtown, came and visited me at the airport and said he thought I’d be better served being downtown [and he was looking to move from downtown]. So he just let me take over the space instead of putting it on the open market. He was opening something in Tri-Cities and he’s still got a presence out by the airport, so he didn't feel like he needed two tasting rooms in Walla Walla.
WWWL: Your downtown spot is great because people will discover you that weren’t necessarily looking for you. They might stop for lunch at Sweet Basil Pizza and see you a couple of doors down – and of course you’ll wave them in!
BRAD: It is a great spot. I like the people walking by, it feels like life is happening just outside my door, which wasn’t happening out at the airport.
WWWL: What’s the experience like at your tasting room?
BRAD: Obviously it’s about drinking wine and having people discover the wines, but I also try to focus on education in the tasting room. As a sommelier and as a student of wine and a winemaker, I realize that most of the people coming in won’t have that kind of knowledge about wine and I try to find a common ground with them. Like if someone’s really more of a beer person, I’ll talk to them about beer and if they understand the difference between Coors Light and Deschutes IPA, for example, and then relate that to the wine. I want people to leave my tasting room not only knowing that they’ve tasted some good wine, but also feeling like they’ve learned a bit more about wine.
WWWL: Can you talk about the unique community among winemakers and the wineries here in Walla Walla?
BRAD BINKO: It’s unreal. It’s amazing. So supportive. It’s awesome. It’s unlike any other community ever. It really is. If you need something or you have a question, you can ask people and they’ll give you an honest answer. That just doesn’t happen in other communities. You don’t see the CEO of McDonalds asking the CEO of Burger King how to make burgers (laughs).
WWWL: And it doesn’t seem like they have that kind of community in other wine regions. People elsewhere would be like, “He’s my competitor, I can’t help him!”
BRAD: That’s because it’s not competitive in a cutthroat kind of way. Sure, there’s a certain competitiveness which comes with wanting to make the best wine.
WWWL: You of course want to get better scores, better reviews than your buddies.
BRAD: Sure, but if you’re making good wine, I’ll support you. I don’t care if the wine got an 88 or a 94. It doesn’t matter to me. If you’re a good person and you’re making good wine I’ll support it.
WWWL: Talk about the wines you like to drink when you’re not at work. What’s in your wine cellar?
BRAD: Most of my cellar is early 2000s Napa Cabs. That’s kind of what I’ve been getting into lately. They don’t suck (laughs).
WWWL: What producers?
BRAD: I’m a big fan of Arrowood. Nickel and Nickel is good. I like the Robert Sinskey wines. Old school producer, those are good values. I’ve also got a couple of old ones from Dominus, a couple hundred pointers that I’m sitting on, waiting for the right time to open them.
WWWL: 100 pointers!
BRAD: 100 point wines, yes. I mean, what does 100 point wine taste like?
WWWL: Well, that’s a perfect score, so the wine should be perfect I guess! My problem with wines over a certain price point is that there’s just too much room to be disappointed. For that kind of money I want the wine to wash my car, do the dishes…the expectations are so high.
BRAD: Sure, the wine should also give you a massage and put you to bed! I hear ya.
WWWL: Tell us about some of your current releases. They’re not distributed, right?
BRAD: I’m self-distributed actually. That means I’m making every contact myself, hand-delivering every case of wine personally. That’s what keeps me on the road so often. Trips to Seattle, Spokane and all over the state.
WWWL: You’re the hardest working guy in wine!
BRAD: (laughs) I’ll take that. Maybe I should start marketing that
catchphrase! (laughs).
WWWL: So with the self-distribution it’s not exactly what one would call “widely distributed” I suppose.
BRAD: True. There’s literally like a place in Renton and a place in Everett and a place in Kent that you can find my wine.
WWWL: You’ve got a white wine, a Roussanne, that sells for $40! That’s pretty unique. You don’t see many whites in that price range. But it’s selling well.
BRAD: The Roussanne does well. It got great scores, it’s won awards. It’s been a good wine for me. It sells mostly at the tasting room. I babysat that wine for two years – nobody babysits a white wine for two years! That just doesn’t happen. I get excited doing different things, trying new things.
WWWL:So when you say you “babysat” the wine you mean that you refined it, made changes to it to get it to where it’s how you wanted it?
BRAD: That’s right. It spent two years in the barrel. Every month I top my wines, sometimes every two weeks in the offseason. When I do that, I stir the barrels and the lees get stirred up. It creates a bigger, broader mouth feel.
WWWL: And eventually it tasted like you had envisioned?
BRAD: It’s a fun transformation, it really is. At first it tastes vibrant and fresh and spicy, kind a racy wine. And over time it mellows and it gets these big broad, nutty characteristics. “Oh hello, you’re so much more than I thought you could be”. It’s a fun wine.
WWWL: That’s a good story. Have you had a wine where you made a lot of changes and no matter what you did, you just couldn’t get it right?
BRAD: For sure. I had that happen with my Red Mountain Cab. It was a wine that I had a battle with I guess. It was the most expensive fruit I had bought and I had a vision for what it could be. But it just wasn’t turning out like that by itself, so the fruit ended up going into my Rocketman Red. It ended up working out fine, but I had to blend it with some other things. So the Rocketman Red ended up being a better value than I had planned, but that’s OK.
WWWL: With all the wines you make, you’re sourcing grapes from many many vineyards. What kind of research goes into deciding where you’re gonna buy your grapes from?
BRAD: Honestly, it’s a lot of tasting wine. It’s about tasting wine from that wineyard, cause if you taste wine from that vineyard and it’s big and bold and tannic and you’re trying to make a fruit-forward “finesse wine” maybe you’re looking in the wrong place (laughs). It’s just not gonna work. But seriously, you’ve gotta taste the wine, you’ve gotta taste the soil.
WWWL: It helps that you’ve got a sophisticated palette, you’ve tasted a lot of really good wine.
BRAD: Definitely. That helps a lot. Sometimes I’ll brainstorm, taste the wine and if I know who made it, I might get in touch and talk to them and ask them about the grapes from certain years, find out what they liked and what they didn’t like. I’ll try to find out as much as I can before I start making the wine because once you start making the wine it’s on a path and you want it to stay on that path as long as possible.
WWW: So when you’re talking to the people from a particular vineyard and they’re asking a certain price for their grapes, how do you know that that’s a good value? How did you learn whether or not buying particular grapes is a good deal?
BRAD: Experience and tasting the wine. It really comes down to tasting the wine from winemakers you trust, ones that you respect and you can understand what they’re doing. It all really comes down to tasting the wine. It’s as simple as that. If you’re tasting a lot of Red Mountain Cabernet and it’s tasting really good to you, well guess what, don’t go to Snipes Mountain for Cabernet, go to Red Mountain!
WWWL: Tell us about your Carmenere.
BRAD: It’s a fun wine. I had noticed that people in Walla Walla were really loving Carmenere and loving different varietals. One of the most unique things about Walla Walla is that t’s not just about Cab, Merlot and Syrah. Those are great, but the wine buyers and drinkers in Walla Walla want something different, they want to taste something new. Carmenere is a great grape. It’s food-friendly and it’s got a great story behind it. It does well in Walla Walla. There’s just a handful of producers that are bottling single vineyard Carmenere in Walla Walla. I’m enjoying seeing that and I wanted to be part of it.
WWWL: The problem I’ve always had with Carmernere is that they’re all $45+ and to me it’s not such an approachable wine right off the bat. It seems like more of an acquired taste – and it’s hard to acquire that taste when the entry-level wines of that varietal are that expensive. But your Drink Washington State Carmenere is just $26. At that price point, it was a lot easier for me to develop a taste for it.
BRAD: That’s cool. That’s the great thing about the Drink Washington State wines. Even though it’s bigger production, I’m gonna do some smaller lots of different things and people like that. I like that. I don’t think I’d be happy if I didn’t make each wine varietal at least once.
WWWL: There’s an interesting story behind your Rocketman Red. You picked all that fruit yourself, right?
BRAD: Yes, me and a few buddies from the EV program went out and picked the fruit ourselves. Typically I’d buy the fruit and I’d pick it up after it had already been picked. But all the grapes that went into that bottling of the Rocketman Red, we went out to the vineyards and picked ourselves.
WWWL: So how would you know which grapes to pick and which ones not to pick?
BRAD: That’s something you learn in the wine program. We were taught what to pick and what not to pick, how to identify diseases and such. Going out and picking the grapes ourselves was not only fun, but part of the learning curve.
WWWL: Kind of like a class trip!
BRAD: (laughs) Yup. We went up to Gamache Vineyard, about an hour and a half from here and loaded up three truckloads.
WWWL: So there’s no wine you won’t make?
BRAD: Well…
WWWL: So when’s your White Zinfandel coming out?
BRAD: I can guarantee I won’t be making White Zinfandel! Barbera and Pinot Grigio are two others I probably won’t make. Too acidy to me. But you never know. I had a customer once who all he drank was White Zinfandel. I tried as hard as I could to get him into other wines, whites, reds, everything, but it didn’t work. That’s when I realized that some people just don’t want to be saved!
