Washington Syrah Secrets Uncorked Terroir, Clones & Next‑Gen Winemakers 🍷🔥 Part 1

Live tasting with 5 top Washington Syrah winemakers discussing terroir, clones, staves, high‑altitude vineyards & vintage trials 🍇 Watch with  ⁨@ThirstyThursdaysat3PMEST⁩  

Youtube: https://youtu.be/DDyejw2eqX8

📌 Summary:
In this episode, I hosted a Washington Syrah tasting featuring five winemaking legends: Bob Betz MW, David Rodriguez, Trey Busch, Rosie Signer‑Jenner & Caleb Foster. They poured their signature Syrahs and went deep into vine clones, site selection, barrel vs. stave aging, trellising influence, stem inclusion, Rocks District terroir, and why Washington Syrah still flies under the radar.

Takeaways:
🌍 WA Syrah blends altitude, sandy loess & cobble soils for unique savory, earthy, floral notes
🧾 Oak staves add flavor—but barrels remain essential for stabilizing wine
🌿 Whole cluster fermentation adds spice & freshness—mirroring Northern Rhône style
🚜 Vineyard choices (trellis, rootstock, block trials) deeply shape final flavor
🎯 WA winemakers are fearless experimenters—cloning, harvesting earlier, terroir expression

CTA:
🍷 Want to taste along? Grab these wines or barrel samples via show notes!
💬 Comment your dream Syrah pairing or favorite WA bottle

🔖#thirsty #thirstythursdays #fnbinnovation #WashingtonWine #Syrah #WallaWalla #RocksDistrict #WashingtonSyrah #WinemakersRoundtable #WineTasting #WineIndustry #WineEducation #WineInnovation #BetzWinery #Enodav #DichotomyVineyards #SleightOfHandCellars #GunpowderCreek #StonyVine #TerroirDriven #WholeClusterFermentation #OakStaves #WinemakingTechniques #VineyardTrials #WineYouTube #MasterOfWine #SyrahLovers #WAWinemakers #CannedWine #Viniculture #VineyardStories #CraftWine #SmallProduction #TastingRoomTalk #WineCommunity #VineyardDiversity #ExperimentalWine #WineStorytelling #ViralWineTasting #WineTrendsetters #Shorts #viral #viralshorts #shorts #foryou

Welcome to Thirsty Thursdays, where Jessie Ott explores **wine tasting** with experts from Washington! This episode features an in-depth look at **wine flavors** and **winemaking**, emphasizing the distinctive qualities of **Washington wine**. Discover insights into **wine education** and production straight from the **vineyard**.

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Transcript

Jessie Ott (00:28)
Welcome everybody to Thursday Thursdays. We have a really, really, really cool and interesting project today. We have industry greats from Washington. They all have variable experiences in The industry and they all bring something different. And so we have several different wine brands that we will be tasting.

Trey (00:39)
Thank you.

Jessie Ott (00:51)
And I'll just kind of reiterate what I've told The team here is when Caleb was on my podcast earlier in The year, we kind of bonded over working for St. Michelle and The conversation that goes around why we need a, we need a Sideways moment for Washington Syrah because we all love it so much. so as we kept talking, this idea of getting industry greats on a call and, tasting their favorite wines.

Trey (01:01)
Thanks.

Thank

Jessie Ott (01:14)
I know it's hard to pick one when you're a winemaker, but everybody's got a wine that we're going to taste. I think what we'll do is just have everybody kind of take a turn and then you can kind of talk about yourself, you know, what you've done in The past or what you're, what, and then, you know, kind of what you're, what you're working on. Caleb, do you have anything else that you want to add?

Caleb Foster (01:26)
Well, it's just, you know, it's a delight. It's so great to be on the program. Thanks so much for having us all here. You're a Washington alumna and you know your stuff. So

this is great. Great to have a little party about Syrah and, you know, in the little pre-chat, you know, Bob was talking about how amazing Syrah is and how it fits the bill for so many wine lovers in America. We've got an amazing group of friends here and

spanning the decades here from Bob's anchor position there on the history of Washington. So glad to have you here Bob and it was just you know all these friends just came tripping me off the tongue when when Jessie and I were talking about this tasting to round everybody up it was so obvious who we should put together some some newbies and some great core people who have been showing off Washington Syrah for some decades here and so I'm delighted. What I'm doing today is I am showing off this

Rattlesnake Hills with a rattlesnake on it, Rattlesnake Hills Syrah, and it is a Bosma vineyard. They have this beautiful vineyard up in the Rattlesnake Hills. Rattlesnake Hills is part what I call the old world of Yakima Valley. It's the upper northern section, northwestern section of Yakima Valley, and it's got a really interesting soil type, which is the Ellensburg complex, and it's basically old riverbed from the Cascade Mountains. That makes it a bit different because

Jessie Ott (02:29)
you

Caleb Foster (02:40)
Like David Rodriguez's amazing wines that he's getting from his vineyards on the top of the hill up there Bosma's got a beautiful hilltop vineyard that's creating that's pulling pulling its wine up out of some really special soils and And dichotomy is right nearby as well So we got three producers up here in the Western Yakima Valley Bob could talk about you know, the depth and history of the Yakima Valley because he was there going on years ago

making really, really beautiful wines.

Bob Betz (03:05)
Hey Caleb, quick question for you. You mentioned the soil. Is one of the requirements for Rattlesnake Hills AVA that they're pre-flood soils?

Caleb Foster (03:06)
I wish it was more geologically based. based on ⁓ relatively in altitude. So it goes from the top of the hills

Trey (03:16)
can chime in about some of those soils though, Bob. Have you ever worked with Porteous Vineyards or Porteous? So, you know, Porteous and even Sunnyside where...

David Rodriguez (03:21)
yeah, absolutely.

Bob Betz (03:21)
Yes. Yes.

Trey (03:27)
Snipes AVA is now. There's a huge band of the ancient Columbia River cobbles. So when the Columbia River used to run right through where the Yakima River is today, and it left this riverbed of... People talk about the rocks district in Walla Walla, and those are huge, know, boulder-sized rocks, softball to football-sized. These are like stone-skipping-sized rocks.

And they all came from Canada and Northern Idaho and that area. And I remember seeing them for the first time in Paul Porteous's vineyard back in the early 2000s. And I thought, oh, how cool the Yakima River brought all these, you know, this river rock down at some point. And he says, well, actually, no, those are from the Columbia River. you know, that's now 30 miles to the east of where you were standing. And so I always felt that was really unique about that area. You just don't see a lot of that.

There's not a huge band of it either, so.

Bob Betz (04:24)
There's there, have you been on that cutout at Snipes where that's probably that 40 foot and there are some great big sweet potato rocks there too. They're not just all skipping stones.

Trey (04:28)
Yeah.

That is true, that is true, yeah.

Bob Betz (04:36)
Yeah, there's

some big rocks there and you know everyone does attribute rocks to the rocks district obviously as they should but you can't miss those that's happening at Snipes. I mean it's really geologically so unique especially for that mid Yakima Valley area.

Trey (04:53)
Right, I've taken photos there many times just to get all the colors. It's very beautiful.

Bob Betz (04:56)
Yeah.

David Rodriguez (04:59)
I agree.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (05:00)
And we're vineyards, as Caleb said, sitting right down at canal level. So we're pretty much the lowest and the temperature difference at night is amazing. Even between here and Zilla, which is 10 miles away. that consistently throughout summer, we'll get down into the 50s.

There'll be the odd night that kind of hovers around in the 70s or so, but consistently we'll get down to the 50s by 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. And that is just phenomenal for growing these delicate floral characteristics on the nose, but then also that really fine tannin and acid to support the structure.

Bob Betz (05:47)
think that heat issue, temperature issue is really important for Syrah To me, the variety is such a chameleon that expresses its diversity depending maybe even more on temperature. I bite my tongue when I say that, but I think temperature has so much to do with the expression of Syrah character, warm sites. we're having a warm site, that's family today. It's warm site, Red Mountain, et cetera.

But as I take a look at the variety across the state, over the years, worked with Syrah from the original planting off of Red Willow Vineyard, Dick Boucher, Mid Yakima, Red Mountain, Walla Walla, rocks, et cetera. Just this diversity of character expression.

Trey (06:22)
Okay.

Bob Betz (06:33)
And I attribute it, yeah, obviously the stones, the geology

has a big influence, but you've got a lot of...

a lot of difference in temperature, not just how much heat you get, but how you get your heat and that daily seasonal weekly variation of in temperature between the areas here. We're having the La Cote Rousse from Betts Family, which is the red slope and we named it after the Red Mountain. And this wine started in 1999. We started making it. was first

Trey (06:47)
Okay.

Okay.

Bob Betz (07:06)
Sarawi harvested and Red Mountain seemed like this

to go and it's off of Scott Williams spot there at the end of Sunset Road and it has it's just big boy but what I find is even you know the heat is good but what helps that site not lose its Syrahness the character of Syrah is this is this huge canopy that it throws it's a vigorous

Trey (07:35)
Okay.

Bob Betz (07:32)
variety and this canopy I mean you're looking with binoculars at the end of

a cane, you know, that keeps going out and out and out. But it helps to shade the fruit a little bit, give them enough exposure, but not too much. So as a general thing for me, too much heat can rob Syrah of its Syrahness

David Rodriguez (07:54)
I

agree, Bob. As a matter of fact, to add to that, I think that we need to actually affirm that there are varieties that as a viticulturist, you can handle a little bit better and you can manipulate in the field a certain way for the finished wine to taste a certain way. With Syrah it doesn't happen that way. Syrah is very prone to the site in which it's planted. So...

Trey (07:54)
Okay.

David Rodriguez (08:19)
The variability right now, having trace, know, that are from a completely different area, you know, in Walla Walla, which are fantastic. And then you have us that are more from the Rattlesnake Hill area. It's just gonna be really, really fun to taste those.

Trey (08:20)
Okay.

Bob Betz (08:36)
We harvest, we, that's Family Harvests, part of that original block that

was planted at Red Willow. And it's a three acre block. We get about an acre. It's south facing, a lot of sand. And it just, it gets powerful. Try to keep it down about 86. 86 planting. Yeah, 86 planting. And it just, it typically delivers

Trey (08:53)
Was that the 85 planting Bob, the old stuff? 86.

Bob Betz (09:04)
You know, it's like the fingers on your hand, you know, you love them all, but there's something unique about the character from that site. ⁓ And keep keep the yield down and try to shoot for about two and a half TPA and ⁓ it's it's dense, it's rich, it's fragrant, it's structured, but with I don't know.

Caleb Foster (09:04)
and keep the yield down and try to shoot for about two and a half TBA and it's dense, it's rich, it's fragrant, it's structured with, I don't know, just a wonderful silkiness to it. We're not tasting it today, but ⁓ it's so we call it the Côte Patriarch to pay homage

to Mike Sauer, the vineyard owner, and David Lake, the two of them collaborated.

Bob Betz (09:28)
just a wonderful silkiness to it. We're not tasting it today, but ⁓ it's so we call it the Cote

Trey (09:32)
Okay.

Bob Betz (09:34)
Patriarch to pay homage to Mike Sauer, the vineyard owner, and David Lake. The two of them collaborated on the first planting of Syrah in Washington at that site, and we still pull fruit off of it. So we the patriarch slope, you know, in honor of those two guys. It's

Trey (09:40)
Okay.

Bob Betz (09:52)
It's emblematic of that issue with Syrah that I find. It's just got so much pigment, a much lower astringency. Sort of, to me, the opposite of Pinot Noir,

which has delicate pigment and a lot of structure, a lot of astringency to it. And of course, Cabernet Sauvignon has a bunch of both. It's what's there.

David Rodriguez (10:11)
What's the clone there,

Bob, on that side? You remember?

Bob Betz (10:15)
it was, think, Phelps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was probably Samsonite based. you know, came up in a suitcase. but yeah, yeah, exactly. And, ⁓ and there, and there. Okay.

David Rodriguez (10:18)
Joseph helped.

Trey (10:18)
Yeah,

I it was all the early stuff, yeah.

Jessie Ott (10:28)
That's what you mean by that. ⁓

David Rodriguez (10:28)
the

Trey (10:28)
Thank you.

David Rodriguez (10:33)
There's a one-liner for you, Jessie.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (10:36)
I was way off.

Jessie Ott (10:36)
There you go.

Samsonite based.

David Rodriguez (10:37)
you

Bob Betz (10:40)
Don't repeat that with any government officials around.

Trey (10:44)
Yeah, there's there's there's

a lot of that in Washington, though, so.

Jessie Ott (10:49)
Yeah, too late. We're too late on that one.

David Rodriguez (10:49)
yeah.

Bob Betz (10:49)
There was a time

when the Phelps clone off of Red Willow was probably responsible for 75 % of the Syrah plant in the state. Now with clonal abundance and proliferation, it's probably not there, but it was responsible for a whole lot of fruit, know, Dick Boucher stuff. A lot of that was originally from Phelps off.

Trey (11:13)
Yep,

of Lewis Vineyard that Eric Dunham and we work with, that's 100 % Phelps that was planted back in 98, which was still very early. There were less than a hundred acres of Syrah that planted in the state in the late 90s even. so I will tell you, Bob, I had the 88 Columbia Red Willow Vineyards Syrah within the last five years. Someone had it from their cellar.

And that wine was still absolutely stunning. First crop off of a Syrah Vineyard in Washington state, that wine was still, yeah.

Bob Betz (11:49)
Think of how we made Syrah back then, know, harvesting at 23, 23 and a half brix and a TA of 0.7, probably high mallet. And yeah, yeah.

Trey (11:57)
Mm-hmm, especially up there. Probably

like a late October pick at 23 Bricks, too.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (12:05)
Ha

Bob Betz (12:05)
sure.

Jessie Ott (12:07)
can I go back just for a second for non-wine maker lingo? I had not heard of this this Phelps. Like, is it, I mean, can you explain a little bit more about what that means? like, did they as a winemaking team brought up some vines and like...

Bob Betz (12:23)
Well, if we had

if we told you we'd have to kill you. I don't know how it got there. But, you know, this whole issue of, you know, virus free and bacterial free, I doubt anything like that happened.

Jessie Ott (12:26)
Well, that's okay. It's worth it.

David Rodriguez (12:26)
Hahaha

Bob Betz (12:38)
just because of how things were in the 80s, you just didn't. But David Lake, who was the winemaker at Columbia, convinced Mike Sauer, with whom he had a very unique, almost exclusive relationship with, to plant this first Syrah planting. And it turns out to be an absolutely stunning decision for Washington state. To give this state...

its opportunity to see how it can perform with this, know, when we were, yeah, remember, were you guys born in the 80s? I'm looking around Yeah. And

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (13:08)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (13:09)
Just a little before.

Bob Betz (13:12)
think, know, Riesling dominated. We were growing Merlot

because we weren't successful in getting malolactic done with Cabernet. And so the wines were, and so you Merlot. I mean, things were just, it was so, if you consider that we're in our young adulthood right now, we were not even adolescents back then. We were children. And.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (13:33)
That's

what we keep

kind of explaining to people. Wine just takes so much time. You an idea, you plant a crop, five years later you might get some decent wine off it. Two years later the market says they don't like it. What are you gonna do? Rip it out? Probably not. But being now 30, 40 years old, now is the time when I think it's really shining. For me, I get to come along after doing this

Trey (13:43)
you

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (14:00)
job for 20 years. And in my 40s, I get to buy this estate vineyard that was planted in the late

80s. We know by now really what's working, what's not working. We can rework the vineyard ⁓ as to what the market appreciates as well now, because we're a bit more professional. And it's just an exciting time for another generation to come through and have their footprint on

Trey (14:12)
Okay.

Thank

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (14:26)
the shoulders of giants that we've already walked with, who had to go through all those trials and tribulations. So you can't, it's a bit of a joke saying how many different varieties there's planted on air, one 10 acre vineyard with nine being the answer. But it was all about trials

Trey (14:31)
you.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (14:47)
and seeing what would work and we're grateful.

David Rodriguez (14:50)
Hey Jared, yeah, I mean, there's a site that I picked fruit from in Zilla. It's one of the highest elevation sites in the lower valley. It's called Carthage. It's kind of up the hill. ⁓ And it's about 1450 on top of the hill. It's one of the highest. It's not the highest obviously, but it is one of the highest in the lower valley. And it's really, really hot site, know, southern facing slope.

Trey (15:00)
What's the elevation up there, David?

Yeah.

David Rodriguez (15:14)
rocky. But my buddy Mohammed, you know, he farms that and he has 11 varieties. He bought this site as is, right? He has 11 varieties and four and a half acres. So you're a little better than him.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (15:33)
Yes, obviously we're friends with Mohammed as well and he's doing some fantastic mavejra that we would love to get our hands on. Well, mean, we actually purchased the site from Australia online, site unseen, and we did it because of the name that...

Trey (15:33)
you ⁓

David Rodriguez (15:37)
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Trey (15:43)
Thank

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (15:52)
the Yakima Valley has for its wine. I'm originally from Spokane and I went down to Australia and I was working for 12 years and then we decided to start our own brand and we just...

Yakama wines were always the original greats, you know, and Syrah being one of them. And since we had spent so much time working with Syrah down in Australia, was that that was the easiest thing that we could come back up here and go, okay, we know how to do this. Syrah is nothing but reliable and reliably delicious.

Trey (16:27)
Can I

David Rodriguez (16:27)
I

Trey (16:27)
ask you guys a question about your time in Australia and now your time in Yakima?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (16:32)
Sure.

Trey (16:33)
So you both have the advantage of making wine in a different place, like truly a different place, as opposed to, you know, we get to make wine from different AVA's in the state and different vineyards. you know, Bob was talking about how much of a chameleon Syrah is, and that's just within our own state. You know what I mean? So it's like we've got a thousand different flavor profiles and aromatic profiles of the same grape just in our state.

Now you guys are making it down in Australia. What part of Australia were you in?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (17:02)
We were down in South Australia, so we spanned from McLaren Vale to the Barossa Valley. And the difference being there as well is the vines would be between 30 and 150 years old. Yeah, exactly.

Trey (17:07)
Okay.

Young vines are like 30, 40 years old there. Yeah.

I remember in the early 2000s when I first got in the wine business, I was working for Dunham Sellers and we drank a lot, a lot of Australian wines. And we really looked up to a lot of the wines that were being made down there. And certainly stylistically, they're very different than I think what we make today, at least what I make today. And even different from what

Eric was making back then, they're making different wines at Dun & Owl. Where did you guys fit in Australia? Because I also know there's a big shift away from that ripe, oaky style. There's a bunch of new producers in Australia now making really restrained, beautiful, elegant, lot of stems, no new oak, all that stuff. Was that kind of where you guys were?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (18:02)
Yeah, I think that is a worldwide phenomenon. Again, it's a generational change. I I can throw that back in. I worked for Rosenblum in San Francisco sourcing fruit from Napa and Paso Robles back in the early 2000s. We had some wine with 17 and a half percent alcohol. it was painful. 100 % new oak.

Trey (18:20)
Yeah, that was Jeff Cohen, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (18:30)
Generationally, I think things are changing anyway. And that is why Washington is in such an awesome place to be able to go with that flow. Cooler climate wines, lower alcohol, more aromatics. And when you're talking of, you know,

like someone in Florida drinking red wine, what are they going to want? This 16.5 % monster or a 13.5%, 13.9 maybe elegant white pepper Syrah? There's one that is far more marketable. The fact of the matter is there is a difference between Shiraz and Syrah, even though, you know...

Trey (18:57)
you

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (19:14)
Biologically, it may not be. Shiraz is black pepper, a

lot darker in color. And it's just because, like I was saying here, most nights are getting down to the 50s, in Australia, you can go an entire month, month and a half, without it getting below 85, 90 at all.

And then every day is 110, 120. So,

Trey (19:45)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (19:47)
you know, we need to keep the water up and not let the vines shut down at that stage. We have something called bagging out where essentially the vine is trying to preserve itself and it'll take all the moisture from the grape. ⁓ And so you learn to work with that.

Trey (20:00)
.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (20:05)
kind of vineyard. You learn to work in that vinification process. So we do do a lot of whole bunch to try and get some greenness in there. But at the end of the day, Sarara and Shiraz is different, pretty much climatically more than anything.

Bob Betz (20:20)
Jared, you mentioned something there about just gives you an opportunity. And I look at Syrah so differently from Bordeaux varieties in terms of what it allows the winemaker to do. Bordeaux varieties have a certain fixed MO that you gotta operate by. And then all of a sudden you get to Syrah and you take a look at harvest dates are.

Trey (20:40)
Mm-hmm.

Caleb Foster (20:48)
in

time.

Bob Betz (20:48)
big deal,

whole stems, indigenous yeast, fermentation vessel, vatting time, barrel selection, barrel influence, barrel length. I mean, there are so many opportunities that we have that the rules are not nearly as applicable as they are for Bordeaux varieties in terms of what you can do. And yeah, you've got leeway, but nothing like Syrah. I think Syrah gives the winemaker such a fun palate to work with.

Jessie Ott (20:49)
you

Trey (20:56)
Okay.

Caleb Foster (21:00)
Okay.

Trey (21:13)
Yeah, you can make a 12.5 % alcohol Syrah or a 15 % alcohol Syrah and everything in between, and they're all gonna be delicious in their own way. They may not be for everybody, and you may have a style that you prefer, but they're all gonna be a very high quality. You can't really say that about Cabernet.

especially in Washington these days, know, like a 12 and a half percent cabernet. I'd be nice to be able to go back to that, but I don't know what that would tell. I wouldn't want to be the guy to make that.

Bob Betz (21:44)
Hahaha

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (21:44)
might have

to leave it in bottle for five years first and that's a risky business strategy.

Trey (21:48)
At

least it didn't get through ML as Bob was saying earlier about cab, you know

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (21:53)
Yeah. Well,

David Rodriguez (21:54)
You did.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (21:54)
I always say that you can tell what a winery does by the quality of its or the style of its Syrah and the style of its Chardonnay. So those two we kind of dictate because those two are the blank palettes for winemakers, right?

Trey (22:07)
Yeah, I like that.

David Rodriguez (22:10)
I I agree.

Bob Betz (22:11)
Yeah, that's.

Caleb Foster (22:12)
to go down a rabbit hole but but it's funny

Jessie Ott (22:14)
Should we try

another wine while we're chatting?

Who would like to go next?

David Rodriguez (22:19)
Well, I can go next if you guys want. don't know. sorry. Sorry, please. Rosie.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (22:19)
Well, since

we've just been chatty chatty, ours is the Dichotomy Sarah and we do 25, 30 % whole bunch in it and we are 900 feet elevation and right along kind of the Sunnyside Canal. And outlook is at Snipes Mountain. So at Snipes Mountain.

Caleb Foster (22:29)
So.

at.

Bob Betz (22:43)
where Rosie

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (22:46)
And this site used to be what used to be called Teft Sellers, which was one of Washington's

Trey (22:51)
Hell yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (22:52)
very early wineries. And it went out of business years and years ago, and we bought it online from Australia, like I said. So yeah. Yeah. And this was our first vintage and it came out absolutely phenomenal. ⁓

Bob Betz (23:02)
Cut scene.

Trey (23:08)
And you said

David Rodriguez (23:08)
It did. ⁓

Trey (23:09)
you're looking

at the back of Snipes Mountain, is that what I heard? Okay, so you're on the north side of 82, I mean. Okay, okay, yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (23:13)
Yeah.

Yes. Correct.

And again, for us, being a young business, this was the first harvest. So we just put all of our Syrah, all the three acres that we have into this bottle. But as we're going on, we are actually separating some of the better blocks off and

doing premium Syrah as well. But just starting out, this is 20 years of experience in making Shiraz and putting in a Syrah bottle.

Trey (23:50)
Well, congratulations, you guys. That's awesome.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (23:53)
Thanks for staying.

Caleb Foster (23:54)
Yeah.

Trey (23:55)
Yeah, what vintage,

Jessie Ott (23:56)
Yeah

Trey (23:56)
by the way.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (23:58)
22. So for us, we were doing the after Halloween pick that year.

David Rodriguez (24:01)
Fantastic.

Bob Betz (24:01)
Yeah.

And it's on the market. What's the price at it?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (24:09)
What's the price on it? Retail $32.

Bob Betz (24:12)
Okay, steal.

Trey (24:12)
Very

fair. So that's another advantage we have in Washington.

David Rodriguez (24:14)
Yep.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (24:18)
Yeah, well mean again as I said though we will do different pricing tiered structures as we go forward. It's just our first harvest moving here from the opposite end of the planet. We had to go pretty straight down the line so as Rosie said this is a honest look at our wine making.

Caleb Foster (24:35)
Yeah, it's beautiful.

Trey (24:35)
You're going to have a fun time getting to learn your

vineyard too. That's always a blast.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (24:40)
Yeah, well we didn't have much to say about the vineyard this year. In 2022, we just kind of came and got the crop. Yeah. and we did. Which is good.

Trey (24:43)
Right.

Jessie Ott (24:44)
you

Yeah.

Caleb Foster (24:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Jessie Ott (24:53)
You rolled the dice.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (24:55)
Yeah,

it's fun to roll the dice sometimes and just take a chance.

Jessie Ott (24:59)
Yeah.

Bob Betz (25:00)
The gift of youth. Sorry. Sorry.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (25:01)
Well,

Caleb Foster (25:02)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (25:02)
You

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (25:06)
20 years making wine for other people and across five different wineries,

Obviously it's nice to go out on our own and whatever this is, we own it and it's all about passion in that bottle for us. But also after 20 years, getting to learn a completely different new environment is...

Trey (25:26)
you

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (25:28)
is awesome. ⁓ Get the grey matter ticking over again and actually have to scratch ahead a little bit during harvest again and experimenting again. So it really is fun to go on to that next stage.

Trey (25:29)
you

Bob Betz (25:43)
And you can do it with Syrah That's what's so fun. You can do it with Syrah. I love that.

Jessie Ott (25:44)
Can you?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (25:46)
Mm-hmm.

Caleb Foster (25:46)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (25:47)
Yeah.

Trey (25:48)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie Ott (25:50)
Can you talk us through some of those challenges or those differentiated pieces of winemaking that you're not used to?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (26:00)
Well, I mean, the obvious one is, so I grew up in the Barossa Valley. and I worked mainly in McLaren Vale, which is well and truly Mediterranean climate, Southern Italy, Sicily, complete opposite from here. where we were in Australia, there is zero issue in getting anything ripe. If anything, you have to hold it back.

We have to keep really big canopies to shade the fruit. We potentially have to water pre-vintage to try to hold things back. Otherwise you can have a problem with being sugar right, but not seed right. And then we came here and Halloween was approaching and we're like, are we gonna pick these grapes this year or?

Trey (26:28)
Okay.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (26:46)
That

Trey (26:59)
Thank you.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (26:46)
was a learning curve. There is a massive amount of pressure in Australia to get fruit off and there's tank space issues because everything's ready within two weeks for the entire state. So the pressure being taken right off here, I mean to go from 23 brix to 25 brix can take a month.

David Rodriguez (27:00)
Wow.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (27:11)
So yeah, there's lot less

Caleb Foster (27:12)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (27:13)
pressure on that side of it.

Caleb Foster (27:14)
Yeah, Bob, it's like the 22 reminded me of what like the old school that this was like, you know where we were harvesting late in the year and like Jared said, you know you've got this long delay for one brix. All you're seeing is a little bit of pH change, right? The fruits sitting out there in the cold.

David Rodriguez (27:14)
yeah.

Caleb Foster (27:35)
You're hoping it doesn't frost. And it's kind of like you've got your fruit in the fridge all night and you take it out and you put it in the warm sun just for a couple hours and you put it back. And then you put it out in the warm sun for a couple hours and you put it back and it's barely ripening, right? So we have this long slide into the end of harvest and it's so different, right? And like 22 actually was one of the latest flowerings. It was like 2011. It was a late June flowering. And I was freaked out in 22 when I was at Hyatt. I was like, oh man.

Trey (28:03)
Yeah.

Caleb Foster (28:03)
first year in Hyatt and got a late flowering. Boy, this is going to be a tough one. I knew it was going to be late, but yeah, to walk into Washington State and be like, whoa, this is taking forever. We're going to get in before the frost and we're at 22 brix. Is this even going to be wine I want to make? I love what you've got here because it not only shows the quality of a cooler vintage, guys, but it's also a really clean, beautiful expression of what you can do character-wise.

David Rodriguez (28:09)
that late.

Caleb Foster (28:30)
I've had your 23 and 24 Syrahs and I know you've got an enormous amount of range in your skill set and this and your wines are going to show a beautiful range. I think there's no beauty in all the range. mean, this is a cooler season. Harvest it just is.

David Rodriguez (28:43)
especially compared to 21 which was incredibly hot.

Bob Betz (28:45)
you get there?

Trey (28:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Caleb Foster (28:52)
Exactly.

From 21 super early, screaming hot, picking in September and August to like, whoa, are we going to get in before Thanksgiving?

Bob Betz (29:00)
But the lines from 21.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (29:00)
Yeah, I kind of feel

like this harvest is working a bit the same. Does anyone think anything of that?

David Rodriguez (29:06)
AMAS

22.

Caleb Foster (29:07)
This isn't really

flowering. This isn't really flowering.

Trey (29:10)
We're right on, I just looked at the growing degree days and we are right on track with last year, like identical.

David Rodriguez (29:13)
you can use them.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (29:17)
Last year was very good.

David Rodriguez (29:20)
It was beautiful. It

Trey (29:20)
Yeah.

Bob Betz (29:21)
I want to go back to your comment about the 21s though. Despite the heat, 21s are wonderfully fragrant and expressive. I like the...

David Rodriguez (29:21)
was a great year last year.

Sure, but

the only problem I had with 21s is that the fruit picked in the Rattlesnake Hills, Natchez area, we got hit by smoke because of the smokes over there in the West side, right? We had a lot of fires in Natchez and that was the only problem we had. It's not because of the heat dome itself. It's more because of, you know, the proximity of new smoke. So 21 for us was a little bit more complicated. It wasn't...

Caleb Foster (29:44)
Yeah.

Bob Betz (29:52)
Sure. Sure.

David Rodriguez (29:57)
a smoke taint that I was like, I need to dump this because it wasn't, it's good. But still, I was struggling with that a little bit. Yeah.

Bob Betz (30:05)
Understood, understood, okay.

But as a vintage across the AVA Columbia Valley, to me it's surprisingly balanced and not oppressively gargantuan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (30:18)
Again, that's the bonus of being in Washington. Again, that's the bonus of being in Washington. Even if you got, or maybe thought of as a pretty tough year comparatively to, I'm assuming California and Australia and South Africa, going through climate change and varying amounts of water people are able to access.

David Rodriguez (30:19)
especially because a lot of people can't write. Sorry?

Yeah.

Trey (30:25)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (30:48)
Washington is in a great spot.

Trey (30:51)
Well, you say that, but this year, hopefully you guys aren't on the Rosa district because I've already heard they're going to close, they're going to shut the Rosa off here.

David Rodriguez (30:56)
No.

Caleb Foster (30:59)
No, they did. They did. ⁓ Yeah.

David Rodriguez (30:59)
They're in the sunny side canal.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (30:59)
It was re-involved on the sunny side, so that

gave us confidence to buy online.

Trey (31:05)
Yeah.

Bob Betz (31:05)
I heard from Hugh Shields

that Rosa was cut off a week ago or so. ⁓

David Rodriguez (31:10)
Thank

Jessie Ott (31:12)
And what is that?

Caleb Foster (31:14)
The Rosa is an irrigation canal that comes out of the Yakima River and it feeds the farms with water straight from the river. They just close the gate and the canal dries.

David Rodriguez (31:22)
Yeah, it's a junior.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (31:28)
But I mean, you know, have those same sort of issues. Obviously California has its own water issues. In South Australia, everyone has their own private dam or pond or reservoir that you fill either naturally by literally damming up a ravine or something, or pumping out well water and filling it with your own well water. And regularly we'd run out of water.

Trey (31:37)
Okay.

Caleb Foster (31:51)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (31:54)
you know, you just got to do everything you can to keep the vine alive. And that's commonplace. So again, I'll reiterate Washington's in a pretty good spot.

Caleb Foster (32:05)
you

Trey (32:06)
Yeah. Jared, you were talking about harvesting all the way out to Halloween in 22. We work with a saracite that's in just north of Prosser off of Gap Road.

So if you follow Gap all the way until it dead ends all the way up to Snipes. If you take a left, you'll go to Dick's Place, Boucher. But if you take a right, you'll go to Lewis Vineyard. And it is a high elevation site, so it's probably quite a bit cooler than where you guys are. almost every year, we work with Sarat all over the state. That's always my last pick.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (32:37)
Yeah.

Trey (32:37)
⁓

Jessie Ott (32:38)
you

Trey (32:38)
And it's you know on the early side it's like October 15th even in a warm vintage. But on a late vintage I picked that in November on several occasions 2011 being one of them and I think 22 we got it off the week of Halloween but it's just very interesting how again you can't lump Washington into one area because you know the Columbia Valley if you were to.

take a photo of that and then try to overlay it on top of say California. You know, it's just it's massive, north to south, east to west. It doesn't really mean anything when it comes to like what is that bottle of wine, other than in fact, it's probably a Washington State wine. But you know, it doesn't really mean a whole lot from that standpoint. ⁓ But it does.

Caleb Foster (33:24)
Yeah, I'd agree with you. It's kind of

like saying, you Columbia Valley is kind of like saying, well, central Spain or south of France or, you know, yeah, Germany, you know, yeah.

David Rodriguez (33:29)
Yes.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (33:30)
California

in general.

Bob Betz (33:33)
That's why I'm a fan of the multiple recent sub-AVAs that we've got in the state. I think it gives the consumer a greater idea of character. we're all going to produce wine of reasonably good to really great quality, but it's a question of character. And AVA specificity helps you define that character. we did.

Trey (33:39)
Yeah.

Yes. The

challenge with AVA's though, Bob, is that we understand that the majority of customers, and I say the majority, I do mean the mass majority of customers, don't really understand the differences of those AVA's. Certainly wine collectors and people who want to talk to us about geeking out about wine.

Caleb Foster (34:04)
Yeah.

Trey (34:19)
know where the Rocks District of Milton Freewater AVA is. You know, they've heard of that. But when you use that on a bottle of wine and then it goes to a grocery store in Missouri, the likelihood of that having an impact probably isn't that great. And so that's where Columbia Valley comes into play. And that's one of things I always admired about Chateau St. Michelle, being a smaller winery and going to Georgia or Florida or South Carolina or wherever to go sell wine.

Jessie Ott (34:29)
He

Trey (34:47)
A lot of the, this is years ago though, but a lot of folks, the only exposure to Washington was Chateau Saint-Michel. And I was so grateful for that because I knew that you're not gonna find a better $8 bottle of Cabernet on a grocery store shelf than a bottle of Saint-Michel Cabernet. If you were to compare that against all the other stuff out there in that price range, it was head and tails better than.

all the stuff coming out of Central Valley, California. So I knew they had a good experience, at least, with Washington. And then we could then show our wines, and hopefully they see what we're doing on a quality level and stuff. Not to say those weren't quality wines, but for the price point, they were very high quality. So yeah.

Bob Betz (35:29)
No, no, and I don't disagree. There's great benefit to the macro for an emerging region. It's like, you know, single vineyards out of Burgundy from Morey-Saint-Denis. I mean, people are, unless you're a geek, a collector, a rock star who spends money crazy, you know, it's not going to make a difference to you.

Trey (35:35)
Cough

Bob Betz (35:53)
But, and that's the beauty. Yeah, but that's the beauty of Washington is you're getting that really high quality at a really low price. I've had bought recently of Bourgogne Rouge that I ended up pouring the bottle away and it's $22, $28, $30 a bottle. And it's disappointing wine because it's unbalanced. It's not from a single site. It's probably over-cropped.

Trey (35:55)
It'd make a difference to your pocketbook.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (35:57)
⁓

Caleb Foster (36:06)
Yeah, you really are.

Bob Betz (36:23)
to the extent that they can and it's declassified or whatever. I don't know the reasons, but that's part of the beauty of Washington Columbia Valley AVA. The people, just real quickly, wrap it up, the people on this screen right now, we are all into understanding Lewis Vineyard versus Boucher or Rox versus Snipes Rox. And I get that. I'm supporting both. I love them.

Caleb Foster (36:23)
Yeah.

Yeah. See, Bob?

Yeah, so Bob, if if you know you've done so much great work over the last four decades, five decades, you've just seen so many stories. You told our story so well. We're going to keep going and we've got another several decades ahead. What can we do to take a major lesson from you on how to communicate about Washington wine? What are some? What do want to see us do for the next few decades?

Trey (36:50)
Okay.

Jessie Ott (37:09)
you

Bob Betz (37:09)
I wish

I had the solution. Nose to the brimstone. No, I wish. I wish I I've been telling the story part of this deal for five. This is my 50th harvest in Washington. Okay. And and and I just I'm still amazed at the lack of awareness, you know, the lack of

Jessie Ott (37:11)
I need some

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (37:12)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (37:13)
Yeah!

Wow.

Bob Betz (37:31)
putting us in the right frame in people's minds. It's gone beyond the question I was asked in 1978, which side of the Potomac River do we grow the Washington grapes on? Okay, yeah, I get it. So we've made some progress, but we still have not captured that cachet. And the one thing that I keep coming back to is never forgetting quality and character.

quality, it kind of is in our blood, but character, wine character, because we will never be able to produce Aussie Shiraz or Hillside Napa Cabernet, okay? But we can produce wine of fabulous quality that has Washington character. And how do we...

Trey (38:06)
Okay.

Caleb Foster (37:58)
Hallelujah.

Bob Betz (38:16)
How do we transmit that? How do we communicate that to people that

this is character that deserves your attention? It's gonna happen in your lifetimes, maybe not in mine, I don't know. But you guys, 20, 30 years from now, I think the world's gonna be a different place. And I don't wanna lean on the crutch of climate change because that's something we're gonna all adapt to in some way or another.

Trey (38:20)
.

Bob Betz (38:41)
mean, whether it's Bordeaux allowing new

varieties to be experimented with, okay, or, you know, is Bill Harlan planting, you know, some crazy, you know, that's gonna do well when it's 10 degrees warmer on average in Napa, I don't know. But focusing on character and quality.

Caleb Foster (38:54)
like Trigga National, yeah.

Bob Betz (39:05)
and keep on telling the message, Caleb, I wish I had the answer.

Caleb Foster (39:10)
Yeah, I wonder. I wonder about this. You know we've got this right? We've got Jessie's pod. You know here we are. We're showing up. We're giving you some visuals. We're telling great stories and I wonder if maybe what we can do is just do more stories like Trey's got this great backdrop. We can see Walla Walla right over his shoulder. I think the visuals you know giving the visuals you know we're not on the Potomac. We're not on the pine trees of Seattle. We're in the desert. You know.

remind people over and over. I'm really glad the wine commission has like pictures of sagebrush and desert, you know, and the blue sky and we to remind people that's where we're from.

Bob Betz (39:43)
All of the above, all of the above. And you know, it's so easy in this challenging market to think about, you know, all these market forces. And in my mind, I hope that our

Trey (39:52)
Please.

Bob Betz (39:58)
wine community, our winemakers always remember that the market and the wine are two separate things. And the market is gonna be challenging. You know, we've seen things before, but never forget that this

This is what we are about. Okay, it's making the wine itself and continuing your focus, getting through the challenges. Think of the winter of, let's see, was December of 98 till February of 99, pardon me, 78 to 79.

Trey (40:22)
Okay.

Caleb Foster (40:34)
Yeah!

Bob Betz (40:35)
The temperature in the Columbia Valley did not get above freezing. And there was probably a seven to 10 day stretch where it didn't get above zero. And so we pulled out, ended up losing 65 % of

the vines. So what do you do? Is you pull them out and you start again, you do it. I remember when we were planting vines at...

down on the Columbia at the Columbia Crest. This would have been early 80s. Somebody popped up with the word nematode. ⁓ my God, what's nematode? It's gonna, you know, everyone was kind of freaked out and Wade Wolf got involved and you know, we weathered that storm too. I'll go back to my statement, the gift of youth, keep it up, okay? Don't forget.

Trey (41:01)
Thank you.

Caleb Foster (41:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, great to see you guys revive Dichotomy. It's great to see you guys revive the old teft and take on some of the at Dichotomy.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (41:26)
Well, it's

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a long-term game. It's a passion project. As a younger generation of owners coming through, it's not cheap to get into agriculture. It's even worse with wine where we don't see any money back for a couple of years.

Caleb Foster (41:53)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (41:53)
you know, obviously people getting into this kind of thing, it is about passion. It's also got to be about business as well though. The people we bought this place off of only wanted to have passion and had no idea actually how to make wine, which was probably a hold back for them. So it's about finding that balance of business savvy and being able to stay in the game, to be honest.

Trey (42:17)
We,

I think we have to end up doing is we have to make sure that we are creating a product that resonates with people. And right now we have to shift a lot of our focus to that younger generation. And you're talking about younger generation winery owners like yourselves and some of the other folks that are getting into the business today. Hopefully.

the product that they're making and the way they're presenting that to this customer is going to resonate with them. You know, I feel like we all make really great wines. In the end, it's, like, are you authentic? Are you telling an authentic story? You know, I mean, yeah, there's a thousand wineries in Washington, but, you know, all the wines aren't the same. Okay, well, why are they different? Okay, well, that's our job is to explain.

Explain to these folks why these wines are different. What's authentic about your brand? What's authentic about the wine?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (43:13)
And getting them out here

and getting them comfortable in a winery. Because I grew up in the Barossa Valley, I have a distorted view of it. I grew up in wineries and tasting rooms. It was very normal. It's such a big industry. Most of my friends are winemakers, vignerons, whatever. And so we need the younger people around here to feel comfortable in a tasting room, working, harvest in a winery, you know, like...

Vintage interns, and that's how I got into this game was just starting with being a vintage intern. I fell in love with it and decided to take it further. And at that stage, all the other interns were my age. So we just, we need to keep getting those early 20-year-olds interested in the industry, seeing how much fun it can be. I mean, it is a fun industry.

Jessie Ott (44:02)
Yeah.

Trey (44:02)
That's just

it. So we're in this fun business.

Caleb Foster (44:05)
Yeah.

Trey (44:05)
And

then I think a lot of times about how wine is presented and and I'm pointing fingers at anybody out in the in the industry but like good grief could it be any more stuffy? you know and and intimidating and all the things that make it so difficult for For we're trying to do and that's to try to get new wine drinkers and we're just throwing all these I say we but There's a lot of people in the industry that still throw up all these barriers everywhere

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (44:10)
I can be a bit snappy.

Thank

Caleb Foster (44:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Trey (44:35)
that it's almost like you must know this much to walk in the building to have a good time. And that is just so ridiculous, you know?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (44:41)
Yeah. No,

you've got to be willing to a glass of wine and then have a good time. That's what wine is for.

Caleb Foster (44:44)
Well, it's great about what you're

Trey (44:48)
I mean,

for us, it's like, come on in and pick out a record. And then, we'll talk about wine after you pick out a record. And now they're kind of relaxed and comfortable and in a good space listening to their Bob Marley album or whatever the hell they want to listen to. We can spend a few minutes talking about that. And then it's like, hey, by the way, this is our Riesling. And it comes from this cool vineyard up here. it's like, you know.

Caleb Foster (44:56)
Exactly.

Exactly.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (45:12)
feel

Jessie Ott (45:12)
I think there's more conversation on this, but I think Bob has to go in 10 minutes. So want him to get to tasting his wine. And I will say when it comes to St. Michelle, in my experience, Ted Basler who was the CEO or president at the time that I was there, what he would always say is when there's a Washington wine on a menu in a restaurant, we all win because rising tides.

Trey (45:12)
That's the goal. That's the goal.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (45:14)
It's more of.

Jessie Ott (45:39)
move all boats or whatever that quote is. Terrible one-liner, I blew it. I think that's also important. The more opportunities that we have to get on a menu, the more liquid to lips and by the glass and all that, that can really elevate.

Trey (45:41)
See ya.

Yeah.

Thank

Jessie Ott (45:57)
the

Washington industry and obviously we're all very much passionate and wanting to see Washington win more, right? I I get with Bob and your 50th, I can't believe it's your 50th vintage year. That's just incredible. ⁓ Every hair has a story.

Bob Betz (46:10)
I either solve your every one of those hairs is what you just you

Caleb Foster (46:11)
other in there.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (46:14)
Okay.

Caleb Foster (46:15)
We'll better every year, every year.

Bob Betz (46:18)
just have the best one liner of the day. More liquid to lips. I've never thought of it that way. I love that. Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (46:23)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (46:23)
Yeah.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (46:26)
We're growing

these grapes every year so people can appreciate wine not just on their anniversary once a year, we're making this every harvest so that people can enjoy it all year round.

Trey (46:37)
Okay.

Bob Betz (46:34)
Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, this wine, Jessie, we've

been making it since 99. It was the first surround we made off of Scott Williams stuff there at the end of sunset up the hill. And we chose rows that were at the very top of his irrigation regime system. And they were the least irrigated. They always struggled. They didn't look as...

Trey (46:46)
you

Bob Betz (47:01)
robust as the lower rows. So we chose

the last couple of rows there and we farmed that for, boy, I'm still getting fruit off of it, I think. I am not sure about this last vintage. And then in two years later, we added some Siel du Cheval to the blend and did a mix of clones. This wine, the 2022,

is a little bit of an experiment. think the tendency, go back to what I said at the very beginning, the tendency for Syrah to me with too much heat is it loses some of its character. That's important, its floral character especially. Yes, it builds richness and gras okay, the fatness of it. But this year, the 22 has...

a lot of Red Mountain, but it's the first time that we've added a little bit from Olsen, which is just to the west, Syrah just to the west of the AVA line. Olsen Brothers has some Syrah there. We've gotten Mourvèdre and Cinsaut and Counoise from there before, but this is the first time that...

We've gotten some Syrah blended into it. So it does carry a Yakima Valley AVA instead of a Red Mountain AVA as a result of it. But it still has that power Red Mountain profile, I think with a little more delicacy. Color is not so opaque. I love purple-black. I think color is an invitation to pleasure.

And this wine lacks that Red Mountain blackness that you can get. It's still. has it's all that black fruit. It's black raspberry, blackberry. I'm not good with the litany of characters, but it has Syrahness

And that's what I love, a little bit of roasted meat and even a little bit of, it's not garrigue per se, but you do get this dried bay leaf and a little bit of scrubby earth sort of smell to it. Long finish.

Trey (48:48)
Thanks.

Bob Betz (49:00)
Delicious, you know, I like wines that taste good and the beauty of being a small winemaker and everybody on this screen is a small winemaker is you get to make the wine you want to drink, you know, it's a great benefit and hopefully other people want to drink it too. We're liquid on the lips. Thank you.

Caleb Foster (49:11)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (49:19)
Liquid on the lips. What about

pairing, Bob? Is there any particular dish that you feel just hits it out of the park with Syrah?

Bob Betz (49:31)
You know, I don't have a real favorite. I can drink Syrah with a lot of stuff. I grill a lot of salmon, okay? And a lot of times we'll drink a Grenache, because all wine would be red if it could, okay?

David Rodriguez (49:49)
There's your wine liner.

Jessie Ott (49:50)
this.

Bob Betz (49:51)
Okay,

and so I drink Grenache with the grilled salmon, but Syrah, a Syrah that has a texture with a lot of silkiness to it, okay, I think can do well with grilled Syrah, not poached. It doesn't work. Grilled Syrah where you've got smoke and you've got char and you've got, you know, that crust on it. I think Syrah does well.

Jessie Ott (50:04)
Yeah.

I feel like there's a range

Caleb Foster (50:14)
you

Jessie Ott (50:14)
of flavors too. Like sometimes you can get a really nice spicy Syrah, whereas, you know, other Syrahs like you were saying are more silky and, you know, soft. So I feel like, do you feel like those, the Washington state can actually handle different flavor profiles of Syrah?

Trey (50:30)
it.

Bob Betz (50:33)
we have to because our individual AVA's produce different characters. It goes back to this chameleon factor that we talked about earlier. They have to. And it's a question of what do people like? It's humor. And that's the beauty of the American market versus making wine and Côte-Rôtie where you have to do what the government says. We can make what we want, and hopefully the market likes them too.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (50:57)
you

Jessie Ott (50:58)
Yeah. And just a quick comment about the AVA conversation that you're having. I'm a WSET Level 3 and I'm not stating that because I'm bragging, but most people don't have that level of education in wine, whether it's in our industry or non-industry. And for me, because there's so many new AVA's coming on, which is actually tremendous for the wine industry, it's just hard to, it's just hard to know.

Trey (51:05)
3

Jessie Ott (51:25)
I don't know them anymore. You know what I mean? There's just so many and there's there in North Carolina and Virginia and which is great. It's just if I'm a wine person and I'm struggling with it, know, others like you like you said, Trey, they're going to it's going to be a difficult thing to understand.

Bob Betz (51:42)
But don't you think that that's true even of those more established regions? Take a look at Germany, take a look at France, Burgundy and the Mosel. Exactly, the Mosel and Burgundy. Exactly. And what you do as a wine lover is eventually you're going to find that realm of acceptable brands. And by that, I mean those AVA's that you know you love and wake up.

Caleb Foster (51:49)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (51:50)
Yes.

Trey (51:51)
even harder over there.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (51:53)
They're only doing a couple varieties though.

Bob Betz (52:09)
you know, and that's what you're gonna gravitate to. And all six of us who are at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, all seven of us are gonna choose something different from each other.

Trey (52:22)
Mm-hmm.

Bob Betz (52:22)
And that's what's going to keep this industry going. yeah, it's confusing and some people will get turned off to it. But hopefully, eventually they're going to find that acceptable brand. I love Gevrey-Chambertin versus Morey-Saint-Denis or Malconsort or something like that. People are to know that and they're going to know those names and that's the wine they're going to buy.

Jessie Ott (52:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

Trey (52:46)
Yeah, I would

I've always said that one of the Bob and I have had this conversation before one of the things that I think what we love about Syrah

is that it is the grape that shows its place more than anything else that we work with in Washington. So Vineyard to Vineyard, it's so diverse. The problem when a consumer side is a consumer may try a Red Mountain Syrah and go, oh my god, I love Syrah. This is amazing, blah, blah, And then they order a Syrah from the Rocks District and they're like,

Jessie Ott (53:03)
Really?

Caleb Foster (53:05)
I felt that a long time.

Trey (53:24)
What the hell is this? They're not even closely related. And so now there's confusion, and they're like, ah, they're a little gun shy. They even order Syrah because they don't really know what they're getting. And yes, that is the sort of general wine drinker. That's not the people who are going to wine country all the time and really getting into it. But we have to recognize that that is a problem because they are

responsible for 95 % of the wine sales out there. We're trying to cater to those 5 % of the really geeky wine people who dig all those interesting facts when the market is a little different than that. And so we just have to recognize that, make sure that we're focusing our attention to both of those things, I guess.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (54:17)
And

Jessie Ott (54:17)
me ask you a question.

Trey (54:19)
Yeah.

David Rodriguez (54:19)
you

Jessie Ott (54:20)
You know, given the price points that you guys kind of play at being a smaller winery and giving, you know, we know that people in their twenties have less money than any, any generation before. So those price points are really tough. Have you ever thought of doing some kind of a Washington winemaker collab where you, can get down to a $15 to $19.99 collection?

Trey (54:41)
and it is the compliment of the United of America. Thank you.

Jessie Ott (54:47)
And it's still, you're still being, you're still small producers, but you're collaborating on something a little bit larger to get more volume, to kind of decrease that price, just to kind of engage them and say, Hey, here's what we can do at this price. And then you kind of follow them along to, as they, you know, get more money, they're making, you know, they're, growing in life and can afford more bottles, just, just out of curiosity.

Trey (54:51)
Okay.

David Rodriguez (55:02)
I think it's.

Trey (55:04)
Thank you.

David Rodriguez (55:14)
I think it's still

Caleb Foster (55:14)
There was a pitch right over the plate for Trey.

David Rodriguez (55:17)
viable to make kind of a $9.50 FOB Syrah in Washington, especially because of the current state of the industry. Unfortunately, the only problem that we have and one of the most or the heaviest problems when it comes to cost is the tariffs right now on foreign stuff, right? When you talk about capsules, corks, glass, well, now glass, you can actually buy it domestically.

Trey (55:27)
Okay.

David Rodriguez (55:40)
I mean, it doesn't have to be from, you know, China, et cetera, but still, you can definitely achieve something. It's not going to be your brand new French oak, big, bold extracted Syrah. It's going to be a leaner Syrah, way,

more neutral oak on that stuff. Maybe 12 months only. So you can get a quicker return. But it is viable to make a $9.50 FOB, which will retail at $20 bucks at the most, right? Let's say, New York.

you know, East Coast, if it makes any sense. I would think there is a viability for that. And I think that is a great, you know, suggestion for a lot of the winemakers right now to make at least one of their wines that way that can go into the market for younger, you know, people's to, to buy and drink and start kind of getting immersed into, you know, into wine.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (56:28)
Well, best of

When we came back and started this vineyard, that was one of the first things we talked about was making sure that we had a $20 bottle of wine. We don't want people to feel ostracized by not wanting to spend 50 bucks a night or every two nights on wine. Yeah. So we do actually have a $20 bottle of red and a $18 bottle of white.

But being a small premium producer, they're our slowest sellers. People come here, they want the better stuff. Exactly. So it's kind of 22 when have the capability.

Caleb Foster (57:05)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (57:05)
Yeah, they're there for a reason. Yeah.

Trey (57:10)
And you're

also not going to be selling that through distribution at $10 a bottle because you're not making any money at that point.

Like, if you're doing that, you have to be making 5,000 10,000 cases to even make an impact these days.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (57:24)
we are, but it's more about getting brand out there and attracting a different core group of prospective purchases. We are very conscious of the market and because we kind of step in between those two generations. So that was one of the first things we wanted to do. It's just kind of getting it out there, to be honest.

David Rodriguez (57:27)
Mm.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (57:47)
And we put wine in a can and we'll do all sorts of other things to try to engage that next generation coming up.

Trey (57:52)
cool, yeah.

Yeah,

rose in a bag. That's the way to go.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (57:58)
whatever it takes. And we've got wines and kegs and you so it's just, you just gotta broaden everything that you've got to try to pull in that younger generation.

Trey (58:05)
Yeah.

Right.

David Rodriguez (58:11)
Sure. That drops your costs too. mean, especially, you know, labor and glass and everything else. if you have water and keg, it, you know, it will definitely drop, your costs for that matter. So yeah.

Jessie Ott (58:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Bob Betz (58:20)
I

don't see, know, we all probably shop at Costco and I see French and Spanish reds that are, you know, nine to $11 a bottle on the shelf. Yeah, that's the only way to do it. There was a $11.49 Vacqueyras, Southern Rhone a KS. It was delicious.

David Rodriguez (58:34)
heavily subsidized, Bob, you know, it's just the market that it's super subsidized.

Trey (58:36)
Mm-hmm.

Bob Betz (58:47)
I'm biting my tongue because this is a Washington Syrah event, it's got to be the subsidies that make that happen.

Caleb Foster (58:53)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (58:55)
subsidies from the Spanish government?

Trey (58:57)
Yeah, Spanish government's basically paying them to be able to do that.

Bob Betz (58:59)
French government, this one, for

Vacqueyras

David Rodriguez (59:01)
⁓

Jessie Ott (59:02)
Paying Costco?

David Rodriguez (59:04)
No, paying the other producer.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (59:04)
No, that's

Trey (59:05)
Paying the producer.

Yeah. Which allows them to sell the wine at such a low price to be able to get it here in the US for $12, you know.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (59:06)
it. sirs.

David Rodriguez (59:13)
Their cost of making it is three, it's three bucks. You know, the cost of selling it to Costco at six, Costco doubles it, it's 12 bucks. They're making money. Yeah, yeah, it's very, you know, it's very, very inexpensive. When it comes to the European Union market, it is a completely different animal.

Jessie Ott (59:14)
Okay.

Jeez.

What a racket.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (59:27)
It's hard to...

Bob Betz (59:32)
Yeah, and we think we are a little bit over planted in Washington. California is even worse and France is even worse and Spain, mean, you know, people are pulling out vines. Thousands and thousands of acres of vines are being grubbed up.

Jessie Ott (59:47)
Really? You think that's gonna happen here?

Bob Betz (59:50)
In Washington? it already is.

Jessie Ott (59:51)
Washington or

Caleb Foster (59:52)
It's started.

Trey (59:52)
It's already happening here.

Bob Betz (59:54)
Not

as our real.

Jessie Ott (59:55)
Ugh.

Trey (59:56)
So maybe

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (59:57)
And if it's not good,

Jessie Ott (59:57)
What are they gonna do instead?

Trey (59:58)
not on that scale, but I mean, when you have the largest winery in Washington state at one point was eight million cases is now down to three. Where do you think all those grapes are going to go? there's no home for all those grapes, right? ⁓ If you looked at a pie graph of Washington, when half of that pie graph is one entity.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (59:58)
accept it.

Bob Betz (1:00:00)
Come quats.

David Rodriguez (1:00:14)
Indeed.

Jessie Ott (1:00:24)
Yeah.

Trey (1:00:24)
And then

there's another 999 wineries over here. And then that half of the pie graph cuts production by 70%. Those grapes are just not going to filter into the supply chain where we're just going to go buy that. So there's...

Jessie Ott (1:00:38)
There's

your Gen Z wine, right there.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:00:40)
Yeah, but we've got to able to sell it.

Jessie Ott (1:00:41)
right here

on Thursday, Thursday.

Trey (1:00:43)
All right, Jessie, I want you to start a brand down in Florida for us.

Bob Betz (1:00:43)
Who is Xi? Who is Jianci?

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:00:47)
I'm

Caleb Foster (1:00:47)
Yeah!

Jessie Ott (1:00:48)
Well, let's create a Thursday Thursday label. about that?

Trey (1:00:51)
This is the end of the video.

David Rodriguez (1:00:51)
There you go.

Caleb Foster (1:00:52)
awesome.

Bob Betz (1:00:53)
Thursday

Caleb Foster (1:00:54)
We're

here for ya!

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:00:55)
it is a reality of this industry. when Teft was at full production around 2010, they were doing 27,000 cases. ⁓ Now, ⁓ 15 years later, we're doing 2,700 cases. So 10 % of what this production facility can do. I can go out and buy a really cheap fruit, this vintage, I guarantee you. But if I can't sell it, what's the point?

Jessie Ott (1:01:22)
What's the point? Yeah.

Trey (1:01:23)
Yeah,

Bob Betz (1:01:23)
And so you've got

Trey (1:01:23)
yeah.

Bob Betz (1:01:24)
the downside of, Kevin White is closing his doors. Kevin White Winery, yeah, he's closing. I've had two calls in the last two months from wineries saying, what do I do? How do I exit?

Caleb Foster (1:01:29)
Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, there's four wineries who, you know, by owners in their 80s out here in the Rattlesnake Hills, they're closing, you know, it's, it's just, yeah, it's a wave. It's a demographic wave. It's also, you know, both on the consumer and the producer side.

Trey (1:01:42)
it.

Okay.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:01:54)
Yeah, well, it comes back to marketing again, though. Americans don't necessarily support the American industry like the rest of the world does. The French support the French, the Australians support the Australians. We're finding out the Canadians support the Canadians. America drinks

Caleb Foster (1:02:01)
Yes, without a doubt.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:02:14)
wine. Yeah. So that's what we need to get across to the East Coast and southern states that don't produce wine.

the premium quality of wines that are coming out of here and maybe try us instead of that French.

Bob Betz (1:02:29)
Kiss French but drink Washington.

David Rodriguez (1:02:32)
Another one-liner.

Jessie Ott (1:02:32)
You

Trey (1:02:34)
Here we go.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:02:35)
the timeline?

Jessie Ott (1:02:37)
Man, Bob, keep him coming!

Trey (1:02:38)
Bob, I'm making a bumper sticker, buddy.

Bob Betz (1:02:39)
Okay,

G.

David Rodriguez (1:02:42)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:02:43)
That's great.

David Rodriguez (1:02:45)
yeah.

Bob Betz (1:02:46)
Cheers.

Jessie Ott (1:02:47)
All right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Trey (1:02:47)
Thank you, Jessie. Thanks, Jared.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:02:48)
Thanks everyone. ⁓

David Rodriguez (1:02:50)
Thank you.

Caleb Foster (1:02:50)
Thanks Jessie.

Trey (1:02:51)
Thanks, Rosie. Nice to meet you guys.

David Rodriguez (1:02:51)
Thank you guys. Thank you, Trey. Bye, Caleb. Bye, Rosie. Jared.

Dichotomy - Jarred And Rosie (1:02:53)
Thank you.

Caleb Foster (1:02:56)
Bye everybody.

Trey (1:02:56)
Caleb, David,

good to see you guys too.

Caleb Foster (1:02:59)
Great to see you guys. What a ball. Thank you, Jessie, so much.

Trey (1:03:00)
Yeah, thank you, Jessie. Appreciate that. That was fun.

Jessie Ott (1:03:02)
That was so fun. Yeah.

your wines are great. Thank you so much for sending it. I really appreciate it. It's last minute. I'm sorry.

Trey (1:03:09)
No,

no, it's all good. I'm glad we got them out to you. I'm glad they made it.

Caleb Foster (1:03:10)
So,

Yes, me too. Good. Okay. Bye.

Jessie Ott (1:03:13)
they're awesome. Yeah. Okay. Bye.

Trey (1:03:15)
Talk to you guys later.