You can add WeatherEye Vineyards to the list of most exciting new developments in Washington. Located at the top of Red Mountain, WeatherEye Vineyard was purchased by Washington State wine advocate Cameron Myhrvold in 2004. Cameron quickly brought on Ryan Johnson to plant the vineyard and hired Todd Alexander to make the wines. The first vintage was 2018, and while the wines are already impressive, the best is unquestionably still to come. I believe there is already a waitlist (they don’t produce much), so don’t miss your chance.
– Jeb Dunnuck
WeatherEye is both a vineyard in the Red Mountain AVA of Washington State, and an estate wine brand utilizing the talents of Vineyard Manager Ryan Johnson and Owner Cameron Myhrvold. The WeatherEye Estate wines are offered on an allocation basis with three releases per year. If you would like to join the mailing list to receive an offer on these small-production wines, please click here.
Our Hillfighter label wines are available throughout the year and can be found here.
The WINES
Put hand selected clones in nano-planted blocks at higher elevation on Red Mountain, often at high density and sometimes with northern aspects. Use this and a variety of trellising techniques to achieve longer hang-times and wines with more intensity, freshness, and non-fruit characteristics. Farm it all with a maniacal level of attention and try and make wines that elevate the notion of what is possible in Washington.
Hillfighter wines
Introducing our Hillfighter Series wines. For Hillfighter, the emphasis is on the art of blending. Currently, we make one Red and one White sourced from a mixture of the very same grapes and vineyard blocks used to create the WeatherEye Estate flagship wines.
When it comes to building the Hillfighter Series, we allow ourselves more freedom to play with the blends with no predetermined destination, and as such, we expect the wines to tell a different story each year. Experimentation has an important role at WeatherEye, as it allows us to fine-tune our viticultural techniques and helps us to better understand our vineyard and how it interacts with the terroir of Red Mountain. And at the end of the day…we want the results to be delicious! It’s our intention for the Hillfighter wines to be enjoyed anytime – now, or cellar them for additional complexity over the coming years.
THE VINEYARD
Stretching along the windswept ridgeline of Red Mountain in Washington State, WeatherEye is planted to 30 acres of Rhône, Bordeaux, and Spanish varieties. We farm our vineyard as a collection of “micro-blocks” that are designed and managed in a full spectrum of densities and trellising methods matched to the soils, topography, and exposures of the site. Two thirds of the vines are head-trained, typically to either a single stake (en echalas) or pruned to an open “bush vine” architecture—both are traditional techniques from the Rhône Valley of France, which we believe adds a unique dimension to the character of our fruit and wines. Vine densities range from 300 plants per acre to over 4,000 per acre in our meter-by-meter blocks. Climbing from 950’ to 1410’ of elevation, WeatherEye features extreme slopes and soils ranging from dune sand to fractured bedrock basalt. The dynamic nature of this site gives us an incredible range of terrain and opportunities for growing wine grapes, limited only by our imagination.