QUINCY — Chris Daniel Winery of Quincy was named one of the 2024 Fabulous Four Wineries at the Washington State Wine Awards, the only Eastern Washington winery so honored this year. 

This is Chris Daniel’s first time making the Fabulous Four, but the winery is no stranger to winning competitions, said Michael Stewart, who operates the winery with his son, Chris Daniel Stewart. 

“We’ve done well in other awards, and that got us on their radar,” Michael said. “Our ’17 Malbec, a couple of years ago, was Best in Show for the Great Northwest Wine Awards (which includes) Canada, Washington, Oregon and Idaho.” 

Michael does most of the actual physical work of winemaking himself, he said. Chris directs the process from his home in Napa, California, and Michael’s wife Dianne handles marketing and publicity. She was a day away from opening the tasting room for the year last spring when she got a surprise visit from Christopher Chan, the man responsible for the Seattle Wine Awards and a participant on the tasting committee that had named Chris Daniel to the Fabulous Four, she said. Chan was passing through and wanted to see the winery for himself. 

“I go out to meet him on the pathway as he’s walking in, and I say, ‘Excuse me, but we’re closed.’ And he says, ‘Oh, I’m early, huh?’ And I say, ‘Well, 24 hours early.’ And he says ‘I’m Christopher Chan.’ So, I went and got Mike off the lawnmower. For the next two hours, Mike and Christopher Chan sat and talked wine in the weeds.” 

Chris Daniel Winery is a small, family affair, Michael said. Chris is the winemaker, having made up his mind at the age of 14 that his destiny lay with grapes. He studied viticulture and enology at Washington State University, learning Spanish along the way, then spent years studying winemaking methods in Chile and France, two of the world’s wine meccas. In 2014, he and Michael, who works by day as an orchard consultant, decided to open a winery using the methods Chris had learned abroad, but on a smaller scale.  

“I had a shop that I could turn into a winery and an indoor pool that we weren’t using anymore, so we could turn that into a tasting room, so we had the infrastructure,” Michael said. “I had all the necessary items for a winery and being involved with vineyards for years and years. It’s a great group of people, and I was like, ‘This is an industry I’d like to be involved with.’” 

The traditional approach that Chris learned overseas, Michael said, is what makes Chris Daniel stand out. It’s a lot of work for a small amount of wine, but the Stewart family feels it’s worth it. 

“After we destem our grapes, we bring them in and hand-sort everything so there’s nothing but grapes in our fermenters,” Michael said. “Then we put them in a cold room for a few days, and that allows the cell walls of the skins to start breaking down. It’s a way for us to extract more flavors and color from the skins without extracting a bunch of tannins later in the process.” 

Chris Daniel’s process involves fermenting the wine in oak barrels rather than stainless steel tanks like larger-production wineries use.  

“(That) helps smooth out the tannins, kind of soften them, polish them,” Michael said. “Very, very few people barrel-ferment, because it’s a lot of work. We have to take the head off the barrel and then tighten the hoops back up, put the grapes in, ferment and then when it’s done, put the head back on, get the barrel to seal again … It’s very labor- and space-intensive winemaking.” 

Larger wineries can put a ton or two of grapes in each fermenter, Michael explained, but the oak barrels only hold 450 pounds of grapes.  

“So we can use different yeasts in a small lot because we have seven to 10 fermenters, and they’ll all be different temperatures,” he said. “So that adds a little bit of complexity to the wine.” 

The traditional approach also means using gravity to move the wine around properly, Michael said.  

“We don’t pump our wines. We don’t filter our wines,” he said. We do 30 months in the barrel, they’re in there a long time, and then maybe another six months to a year in the bottle, so that they’re a nicely aged wine when we release them. They’re much more approachable.” 

    The Fabulous Four award is proudly displayed in the tasting room of Chris Daniel Winery in Quincy.
 JOEL MARTIN/BASIN BUSINESS JOURNAL