Welcome To Bridgepress Cellars

We are honored to work with Pepper Bridge Vineyard, Seven Hills West and XL vineyard in making our wines.

Seven Hills West vineyard is located just on the Oregon side of the border in the Walla Walla AVA.  This is a former apple orchard site and the soil type is basalt cobblestone.  Nicknamed “The Rocks”, these cobbles lie on an old outwash plain of the Walla Walla River.  The vines are oriented on a North-South axis at an elevation of 950 feet. more

Pepper Bridge Vineyard is located in the Walla Walla Valley appellation, nearly on the Washington and Oregon border.  It was originally planted in 1991 by Norm McKibben and has been managed from its inception by Tom Waliser. Beginning with just 10 acres it now encompasses nearly 200 acres at about 900 feet elevation.  We currently source Merlot and small lots of Cabernet Sauvignon from this vineyard.more

XL vineyard is located in the up and coming new hillside vineyard area called SeVein.  It is just to the south of Seven Hills Vineyard in the Walla Walla AVA.   Planted in 2007, it encompasses 47 acres, planted on a north facing slope, at an elevation of 1200 feet.  The vineyard is owned by John Rempel, and managed by Chris Banek. more

We strive to source our grapes from both well established vineyards and those ‘up and comers’ that we feel are well positioned in areas that allow for unique and complex expression of the fruit.

We typically employ a saignée method with many of our red varietals.  This technique allows us to remove 10 to 20% of the juice 24 to 36 hours after the grapes are crushed.  By doing this we concentrate the remaining juice left in contact with the skins, enhancing the color and complexity.  As well we can then ferment the initial removed juice into our popular Rose’.

Although we would all like to make this our full time passion, since we are a small winery we have to continue with our regular ‘day jobs’.  Because of that we rely heavily on the assistance of our friends and families to get us through some of the more time consuming and labor intensive parts of the process.  Without them we could not make this happen and so a big THANKS goes out to all our ‘volunteers’.