Wine paired with art

TimberRock Winery inhabits a picturesque, forested 30-acre Post Falls location, but the winding, narrow road leading to it doesn’t offer quite the access that its owners wanted to provide to existing and future fans of their wines.

“It’s a glorious place to live, but it’s not a particularly good place for a retail business,” said TimberRock owner Kevin Rogers.

“We didn’t want to load people up on wine and send them down that road,” added wife Michelle Rogers. “But we always thought we’d like a tasting room to have that interaction with the public.”

So to get their wines swirling on the tongues of more people, Rogers and her winemaker husband, Kevin Rogers, last week opened a tasting room in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

The metal and stone tasting bar shares space with the Studio 107 art gallery on Fourth Street, just north of Sherman Avenue. A plate of gourmet chocolates waits to be paired with the wines.

“We had been thinking if we ever did open a tasting room we wanted it to be in downtown Coeur d’Alene,” Michelle Rogers said, adding that sharing space with the gallery saves both businesses money.

The tasting room is already getting quite a bit of walk-in business.

Coeur d’Alene resident Lori Mille came in last week after seeing the sandwich board sign out front.

“I thought why not go in and try the wine,” Mille said. After tasting she left with two bottles.

Kevin and Michelle Rogers started selling TimberRock wines in 2001 with Kevin’s cabernet sauvignon. Since then they’ve added a number of different wines to their lineup, including an ice wine, their “Trio” red wine blend, a chardonnay and a Riesling.

Many locals may know the wines for their quirky porcupine labels designed by Montana artist Alan McNiel.

The latest cabernet sauvignon, however, sports a more reserved, tree-bedecked label.

“It’s a serious wine, and Kevin wanted a more serious label,” Michelle Rogers said.

Rogers said her husband approaches every activity, whether it his Kootenai Animal Hospital business and veterinarian duties or his winemaking “hobby,” with passion and zeal.

He’ll spend a full work week at the veterinary clinic and then in the evenings and on weekends put in a full week’s worth of work at the winery.

“I just have a passion for the things I do,” Kevin Rogers said. “When you enjoy doing stuff, the long hours it takes doesn’t seem so laborious.”

He describes winemaking as his artistic outlet.

Quality is more important than quantity.

Total production is at about 1,100 cases per year.

The winery sources its grapes from select Washington vineyards. TimberRock’s “Old Vines” Chardonnay, for example, is made with grapes from the 37-year-old Smasney Family Vineyard near Prosser, Wash., Michelle Rogers said.

As a small winery, they don’t own their own bottling equipment. Last Saturday a bottling truck with all of the mechanized equipment to bottle, cork and label the wines pulled up to the winery and processed this year’s vintages.

The tasting room will be staffed by seven part-time employees, with Michelle Rogers leading the charge.

She used to work as an in-flight respiratory therapist and EMT for MedSTAR, but quit that job to focus on the winery and raising the couple’s two small children. Their other son is in high school.

The winery is unlikely to ever produce more than 2,000 cases of wine a year,” Kevin Rogers said.

“We want to keep it small and focused,” he said. “Our focus is on the local community and making our niche with our friends and family.”