Kate Michaud of Double Canyon Q&A

Kate Michaud: This past year has taught me about my team and about trust and shared experience. Getting to come to work every day while we watched the rest of the world stop was a gift that gave us normalcy. It provided us the space to get stuck into work and only experience the collective despair and uncertainty after work. This protected us. Our team experienced every newsflash, mandate and grim milestone together. We put our trust into each other to keep us all safe and together lamented each forgone trip. We watched the pandemic get closer and closer to us all while showing up and keeping our heads in the game of making great wine. I am super grateful to my team for keeping us all safe and for walking through this together, intact.

KM: I think it would be balance but that isn’t easy to identify across my body of work in wine because finding balance is really just being responsive to each particular circumstance in a given blend. It would be like if you noticed you hit balance in your kitchen every time you cooked. One night it is a curry, the balance of coconut milk, salt and lime. Another night it is salad dressing, balancing lemon juice, salt and oil. It is hard to connect the dots between the two except that they were both balanced in their own right. In wine balance it is often about the play of acid, fruit, and tannin. The nose of a wine needs to announce itself in a way that compels you to take a sip. The entry, mid-palate and length need to flow. There needs to be an arc, balanced concentration to tannin all weighted by a core of fruit. All arcs don’t need to look the same. They can take on many shapes and finding your way to that shape is often intuitive. Knowing what each lot will do for your blend, and how to apply them most powerfully is the game.

Also, I think most of the wines I touch are pretty good to go without food. It isn’t deliberate but seems to speak to my palate.

KM: The Horse Heaven Hills appellation is this long, flat bench bordered by the Columbia River on one side and the Yakima Valley on the opposite side. The bench is a modestly high, wide open, exposed expanse with mostly dry farmed wheat and irrigated vineyards. The river plays a the star role in distinguishing it from other Washington appellations that all share our short but fruitful growing season, because of how weather moves up the river in an unimpeded way. Mostly that manifests in high winds which are stressful to the vines. Stressing vines is interesting because growing great fruit mostly includes some kind of struggle in an effort to grow smaller berries which translates to more concentration. All the building blocks and distinguishing features of wine come from the skin of a grape rather than the pulp. So when you grow small berries you are increasing the proportion of skins where color, tannins and flavors reside and minimizing the pulp that is just water and sugar.

KM: I love this question! Like an artist, I think in wine you work on an idea or concept to fruition. A vintage or a vineyard block, or lot of wine is the piece and each year you get to further your concepts of winemaking and make another iteration. Picasso did this series of paintings based on Velazquez’s Las Meninas. He spent a summer iterating over and over and furthering his ideas, in his case abstracting more and more. It is super fascinating to see where he started and which part he altered or furthered in each version. We get to do the same thing except in wine. Each year is an opportunity to work with the same block of grapes and take it further in some direction that may or may not be abstract. Each vintage adds to the series. The origin of the grapes can tie a series together or it could be a style that ties together a body of work. A winemaker gets to overlay a direction that each year may go farther, change direction or pull back. And then there’s nature which has a hand in this, too.

KM: I wish I could say flashy stuff but right now it is really just dog walks, slow jogs, hair wash days and Netflix. I like to take the week to read the Sunday paper, but get anxious as the sections inevitably pile up week to week. When the world opens back up I plan to get lost in some exotic-to-me city with no agenda and no list of sights I need to see. For me it is never the castles or museums I recall. It is always the corner bakery you went into enough times that you get a familiar nod.

KM: I want to say artist or maker. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be a commercial success, but I’d have a studio where I’d get to spend the day fleshing out ideas. Maybe welding. I’d spend my time being creative visually and manifesting stuff. That would be very satisfying.

Also, I have some pent up need to flip a house in a very uncommercial way that would never ever yield return.