A local winemaker near Yacolt continues to experience success and validation in his craft by regularly receiving awards at Pacific Northwest competitions.
Pomeroy Cellars owner Dan Brink’s most recent achievement came with six accolades at the Seattle Wine Awards, Washington state’s largest and most-prestigious professional wine competition, including a double gold for his 2020 cabernet sauvignon. Other gold winners included his 2021 Lucia red blend, 2020 merlot and 2021 Meritage wines.
“It’s validation for what we do here,” Brink said of the Seattle Wine Awards. “We opened in 2014. So, I started entering a lot of the wines around 2015-2016 in the competitions, and year in and year out, we consistently do pretty well in the awards competitions.”
Brink added when a wine earns gold at competitions, it is entered into a platinum Pacific Northwest wine competition that takes place in the fall.
“Just to get an invite to the platinum competition, that’s obviously pretty difficult because you have to have gotten gold or double gold or whatnot in any other competitions … So just to get invited is kind of an honor,” He said.
Last year, Pomeroy Cellars’ cabernet earned the highest-rated wine and best in show at the Seattle Wine Awards. This year, the double gold still brought plenty of accolades for Brink along with the other five award winners.
In order to reach the level Brink has with Pomeroy Cellars near Lucia Falls County Park, he said his winemaking has been full of trial and errors.
“Probably six or eight years ago, I kind of found the secret sauce of the recipe, if you will, of what I was looking for in my wine-making style and have kind of tried to repeat that process year after year,” Brink said. “Obviously, each vintage is a little bit different, which is why wine’s cool because there’s vintage variation. … People expect vintage variation or variation from batch to batch, and that’s kind of what the wine people like, is to be able to geek out and talk about, ‘Oh, this is a cool year. This is a hot year.’ ”
Brink first developed an interest in wine after taking a class at Washington State University in the fall of 2003.
“I kind of took it as a dumb college kid thinking that you could drink wine for credit, but through that class I really found a love and a passion for wine,” Brink said. “I didn’t really do anything with it at the time. I hadn’t really drunk much wine up to that point, but from that point forward, I started drinking more wine and kind of noticing its nuances, and it was always kind of in the back of my mind.”
Brink moved back to his family’s property in 2009 and began making wine as a hobby. He said his grandfather made fruit wines at Pomeroy Farms for years. Brink said he started making wine using a lot of fruit and wine grapes.
“It obviously was a hobby that got out of control pretty quickly as it went from 2009 as a hobby to 2014 opening and taking her to here,” Brink said. “From that point forward, it kind of became a part of my life as far as pairing with food and as opposed to drinking beer or getting into the microbrews and that sort of thing. I started to shift more towards wine.”
Brink’s operation at Pomeroy Cellars doesn’t include growing grapes for his wines. His grapes are sourced from two vineyards in the eastern reaches of the Yakima Valley, DuBrul Vineyard in Sunnyside and Inland Desert Nursery and Vineyard in Benton City.
“Making wine and growing grapes are two completely separate things. Growing grapes is farming, which are two totally different sciences,” Brink said. “So I always tell people I let farmers farm, and I make wine. We’ve got a couple of acres planted around here that I take care of so I know enough about growing grapes to be dangerous, but people that have commercial vineyards, they have degrees to do that, so they’re very different sciences.”
He added it’s possible to have a loose understanding of how either one works if you want to be good at either, but people gain a romantic idea regarding wineries.
“It’s amazing how many times people kind of always have in their mind this romantic idea that it’s like, we have our vineyard, and we make our wine to sell it out of our tasting room,” Brink said. “It’s pretty rare actually that a winery is that vertically integrated. There’s a lot of wineries that just make wine and sell out of their tasting room and they just let farmers farm.”
Pomeroy Cellars is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday at 20902 NE Lucia Falls Road near Yacolt. To learn more and to purchase wine outside of the tasting room, visit pomeroycellars.com.
