It’s a Cellars’ market

Long before the family started Arbor Crest Wine Cellars, Mielkes had been dreaming for years about grapevines in the Spokane Valley.

“My grandfather was a farmer and he had a lot of cherry orchards … but he had a passion for grapes, vineyards,” says Kristina Mielke-van Löben Sels, Arbor Crest winemaker. “Cleaning out a lot of stuff here I found some correspondence he had with UC Davis asking, ‘Can we grow grapes here?’ That was in the ‘40s.”

Nothing came of the exchange, but when her father and uncle were trying to decide what to do with the farm land and cherry processing plant some 30 years later, Harold and David Mielke did more wine research of their own.

“They actually planted a bunch of grapes around here to find out which ones were cold hearty…they were not necessarily good quality wine grapes, but they did a lot of experimenting and that was fun,” Kristina says.

Even though they realized it wasn’t a prime growing area for grapes, the Mielkes decided to forge ahead anyway. In 1982, they started Arbor Crest Wine Cellars. It was Washington’s 29th winery. (Today, the state hosts 370 wineries).

“My dad always had a huge love of wines… I grew up in Northern California and Dad would go to wine country whenever he could,” she says.

Kristina was 12 when the winery joined the family and she would spend each summer working here. She loved it enough that she would eventually turn to the place her grandfather once sought advice, the University of California-Davis.

She earned a degree in fermentation science and took a job as associate winemaker for Ferrari-Carano Vineyards in California’s Alexander Valley.

In the midst of it all she met Jim van Löben Sels, who had grown up among the cabernet and sauvignon blanc vines in his uncle’s winery. He is a graduate of the agricultural sciences program at Davis.

They had just found their own six-acre dream on land surrounded by multimillion dollar vineyard estates when Kristina’s uncle decided to retire. He turned ownership of Arbor Crest over to his brother and sister-in-law Harold and Marcia Mielke and called his niece to say it was time to bring her wine expertise to the family operation.

“We were planning to plant grapes (in California) … we were going to come up here, but it was going to be later. Anyway, you’ve got to love how life turns on a dime. We came up in 1999, and we haven’t looked back. We absolutely love it up here, and we love what Washington fruit gives us.”

In the seven years since, they’ve been tinkering with the Arbor Crest operation. She has beefed up the red wine production and scaled back some of the sweet wine offerings.

The couple shares general manager duties and Jim oversees the grounds at the Arbor Crest Cliff House (there are five acres of vines at Arbor Crest, including chardonnay, pinot gris and pinot meunier), and manages the vineyard contracts for the winery. Their 3-year-old son, Jack, loves making the vineyard runs to check on the fruit with his dad. The couple is expecting another little boy in July.

Although they gave up their dream of planting vines in California, some of the fruit they planted early on in Washington is coming into its own. Wines made from varietals planted seven years ago on the Wahluke Slope, the state’s newest viticulture area, were just recently released.

The wines, a 2003 Malbec ($28) and 2004 Petite Syrah ($28) are available only at the Cliff House tasting room or Arbor Crest’s new tasting room on the third floor of River Park Square downtown.

The van Löben Sels are excited about the “condensed flavors” of that fruit and expecting great things from other clones planted on 16 acres there. They’re also experimenting with vines in another up-and-coming growing area on Red Mountain.

“Washington is still in that exploratory stage. We’re in our infancy relative to Napa/Sonoma. … They’ve already defined what grows well at specific site,s and we’re still going through that,” Jim says. “But we’re very diverse, too. We can grow everything from the Riesling all the way up to the cabs, and it’s a much larger territory… so that gives us opportunity and options, too.”

Arbor Crest produces about 20,000 cases of wine each year. The best sellers tend to be sauvignon blanc, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, Riesling and its higher end Dionysus red blend ($45).

They’ve continued to upgrade the tasting room and expand events at the winery’s historic Cliff House on Fruithill Road. The estate perched on the cliff above the Spokane River springs into the season with some 10,000 tulip and daffodil blooms each year. The winery also hosts Sunday concerts on the grounds in the summer and has become a destination wedding site. It gathers glass artists from around the region for its annual Glass on the Grass event.

And now it’s easier to get there, with improvements to the winding road to the top of the hill.

Kristina strives for “elegant, but fruit-forward wines.” She wants early finesse, yet a nice structure to ensure they age well.

“I make my wine to go with food. In all of my wines, there is a real nice acid balance that just complements food,” she says.

She loves experimenting with wine and food pairings so much, she couldn’t pick a favorite.

Her husband says although he’s been surprised by the offerings at winemaker’s dinners (he remembers a cabernet franc and warm blueberry bread pudding dessert from four years ago) he still loves the classic pairing of filet mignon with cabernet sauvignon: “Something elegant with something carnivorous,” he says.

Kristina’s mother, Marcia, shared some of the family’s favorite recipes for serving with Arbor Crest wines (recipes follow).

The winemaker says it’s the love and the laughter you share around the table that makes dinner special.

“Wine and food brings people together, brings families together, brings friends together.”