Developing a taste for business

The winemaker’s daughter never really thought making wine was all that fun.

Sure, Natalie Conway-Barnes helped out around her family’s winery while she was growing up. And as she got older she enjoyed helping people in the Latah Creek Winery tasting room and gift shop. But mostly, if her help was needed in the winery, it was for the grunt work – bottling and labeling. As a teen, wine wasn’t part of her dreams for the future.

“I wanted to be a physical therapist,” she said recently, standing among the winery’s stainless steel tanks helping her father Mike Conway filter Muscat canelli.

It wasn’t until Conway introduced his daughter to some of the science of winemaking that he finally won her attention. The two began by pressing grapes and dividing the juice into two tanks. They added different yeast strains to each batch and through repeated tastings, began to better appreciate the subtleties of making wine. Natalie began to rethink her career plans.

Mike Conway now wishes he would have included Natalie in some of the more detailed work at the winery, though he and his wife, Ellena, didn’t want to push. “We had always hoped that she would do this, but we wanted to let that happen on its own,” said Ellena Conway, who oversees the business’ books and is known for whipping up delicious meals to show off the winery’s offerings.

The Conways want Natalie to learn about wines the way Mike did – by working in the winery. Mike Conway worked as a microbiology technician for E&J Gallo and later Franzia Brothers, before he became the assistant winemaker for Parducci winery in Northern California. “I learned from someone who was making wines the way his father made wines,” he said. “We’re actually teaching her to make wines the way I learned… rather than from a book.”

Realizing he would never be more than assistant winemaker at the Parducci family business, he left California for the opportunity to start a winery in a little-known winemaking area – Washington state. The fledgling industry included only a handful of wineries at the time. Today, Spokane is home to 10 wineries, with two more planning releases within a few years. Across the state there are more than 360 wineries, according to the Washington Wine Commission.

Mike started the now-defunct Worden winery in Spokane and his own venture, Latah Creek. The winery turns 24 this year.

Natalie earned a biology degree from Eastern Washington University and is now her father’s apprentice. She’s 21 years old. She’s resisted advice from people who say she should attend a prestigious enology program such as the University of California, Davis. If she did, Mike says she’d learn some fundamentally different winemaking styles.

For example, at Latah Creek the Conways let their Muscat wines languish for eight or nine weeks during fermentation – a slow, cold process. At UC Davis, Mike says, they teach students to use a much shorter timeline – two weeks – which changes flavor of the finished wines. Latah Creek’s longer fermentation allows the Muscat to keep some of its more subtle fruit characteristics, he says, including melon and honey.

“People love our wines, so why change it because of what a few people think,” says Conway-Barnes.

Latah Creek produces 16,000 cases of wine each year, more than they ever expected to be making. They planned to limit production to about 11,000 cases each year – and built a winery to handle that capacity – but a few years ago they started to run out of the most popular wines by Christmas.

Wine sales have come full circle since the winery started, Conway says. Early on the winery relied on local sales, as production and interest grew Latah Creek was selling in 25 states. Now, about 95 percent of winery sales are concentrated in the Northwest.

The Conways make affordable, food-friendly wines and have largely ignored the trend toward making the more robust red wines and their higher price tags. Latah Creek wines have scored well with Wine Spectator magazine and have received “best value” ratings. The wines, Conway-Barnes says, always score well against more expensive wines in blind tastings.

Even so, she says, out-of-town tasters can be put off by the relatively low prices of Latah Creek offerings. Natalie says she’s had people turn around and leave the tasting room when they found out the wine prices. The winery doesn’t sell a wine for more than $20 a bottle. Natalie says she’d like to make a higher-end red wine so they can capture the interest of those tasters and show them wines don’t have to be expensive to taste great.

Growing up the only daughter in a winemaking family has had some advantages, Conway-Barnes says. She’s always been tuned in to the flavors in food and drinks because it was a constant source of discussion at the family dinner table.

Still she says the variables in winemaking have been surprising and sometimes overwhelming. Walking the vines with her father just before harvest this year she noticed a dip in elevation in one of the rows. She was struck by the difference in the taste of the fruit there as compared to the rest of the row, she says. A mere two feet in elevation had changed the flavor of the grapes.

“It’s amazing just how many factors there are,” she says.

In the past 24 years, Ellena Conway has compiled her favorite recipes that can be made or served with Latah Creek wines into two cookbooks – “Just Released” and “Just Released 2.”

She shared some of her favorites with us. Here are the recipes: