Siblings and long-time Columbia Valley grape growers Bill and Andy Den Hoed have partnered with Long Shadows founder Allen Shoup and Boudreax Cellars owner and winemaker Rob Newsom to produce Den Hoed Wine Estates.
The partners have been working on the project since 2005 and are releasing the 2005 Den Hoed Marie’s View red blend and 2006 Den Hoed Andreas Cabernet Sauvignon this fall.
The wines are named after the Den Hoeds’ parents, who were Dutch immigrants. They started farming in Washington in the early 1950s and planted their first grapes in the Columbia Valley in 1956.
Shoup spent 20 years as the head of Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates and started Long Shadows Vintners, a partnership of internationally-acclaimed vintners, in Walla Walla in 2002.
The Den Hoed family had considered winemaking for decades, but it wasn’t until they started working closely with Shoup and his Long Shadows winemaking partners, that they moved forward on the idea.
“What Long Shadows was doing was so exciting that my brother and I decided we wanted to do something equally exceptional,” said Andy Den Hoed. “They convinced us that with the right winemaker we could excel as long as we concentrated on quality over quantity.”
In 2008, Shoup and a group of investors formed a partnership that purchased 80 percent of the 750-acre picturesque Wallula Vineyard from the Den Hoeds, who kept 20 percent and a management contract.
The Den Hoeds developed the unique vineyard, by carving benches out of the steep, south-facing bluff in the Horse Heaven Hills in 1997. The vineyards elevation drops more than 1,000 feet from the top to the edge of the Columbia River, giving it a vast assortment of microclimates, creating the best growing environments for various types of grapes.
After Shoup and his investors purchased the site, Shoup renamed the expansive property ‘The Benches,’ saving the ‘Wallula Vineyard’ name for the earliest planted vines and the large biodynamic vineyard planted for Randall Grahm.
The Den Hoed Wine Estates used grapes from small blocks in the Wallula Vineyard section of The Benches.
Newsom made the 2005 Marie’s View and Gilles Nicault, the in-house winemaker for Long Shadows, made the 2006 Andreas Cabernet Sauvignon.
For more information, go to www.denhoedwines.com.
by Mary Hopkin
Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business
