Yakima Restaurants Go Corkage-Free
Urban wineries and retailers pair with eateries to build business
Wines & Vines, 9/29/09

Kana Winery, in downtown Yakima, is growing up. There has been lots of great changes. They used to crawl; now they are on the run! Please read-on…

NEW WINEMAKING TEAM: They are taking their wine quality to another level with a new winemaking team. Dr. Wade Wolfe, who received his doctorate in enology-viniculture at UC Davis, has taken the role as Kana’s winemaking and vineyard consultant. He is the only PhD winemaker in the Yakima Valley. Ben Grossman is the winemaker. Grossman has formal education in fermentation science and is a tenured assistant winemaker from Stimson-Lane. He had previously worked at Windy-Point Winery before joining the Kana team.

REDESIGNED LABELS: Kana has hired Carrie Fergusson of Yvonne San Luis Design in Seattle and Tri-Cities Artist/Photographer John Clements (recently feature-covered in the Mid-Columbian Magazine, Winter-Spring issue) to design their new label. Each label has its own wine-specific artwork and features the new Kana logo. All whites for 2006 and reds for 2005 vintages and beyond will carry the new labels.

INCREASED PRODUCTION: They’ve nearly tripled their production facility size by taking over the adjacent Donitelia Winery’s production space. They now have a “dry” storage/office/lab room, a “wet” tank/barrel/production room, and an outdoor crush-pad, all totaling about 8,000 square feet. Kana is the only Yakima Valley winery with both a hot-water system and an Ozone sterilization system — guaranteeing a super-clean, state-of-the-art wine production environment.

LINEUP OF NEW RELEASES: Kana Winery’s new releases of wines have evolved into a great lineup. They have narrowed their focus to a handful of wines after peaking out at 17 different wine releases last year and have made minor adjustments on their blends and the wine label names. Their wines are now distributed throughout Washington State and in Chicago, Japan and soon-to-be in Portland, California, Idaho and Tampa, Fla.

MORE WINERIES FOR YAKIMA: For a short while Kana Winery was the only producing winery in the city of Yakima, after a few wineries shut down, moved, or stopped their own production. There are now seven wineries and it is rumored that there are two or three more in-the-works that will have a Yakima city zip-code. The success of Kana has been contagious to this wonderful surge in winery growth! As a matter of fact, in its six vintages of production, Kana Winery has done custom wine-production for seven different wineries, both here and abroad, most of them being award-winning wines and having proudly written “produced and bottled by Kana Winery” on their bottle’s back label.

So make a visit to Kana Winery to see part of the re-vitalization that has taken place in downtown Yakima. Please check out their tasting room in the historic Larson Building, or visit them online at www.kanawinery.com.