After decades under corporate ownership, Washington’s most influential winery returns to local hands.
In Washington wine, almost every road eventually leads back to Chateau Ste. Michelle.
Generations of winemakers have passed through its cellars. Vineyards across eastern Washington were planted to supply its tanks. For decades, if a Washington winery hoped to reach a national audience, the path often began somewhere inside Ste. Michelle Wine Estates.
Late last year, the winery was acquired by the Wyckoff family, third-generation farmers from Washington’s Yakima Valley whose relationship with Ste. Michelle stretches back nearly half a century. Growing up, Court Wyckoff spent long stretches working among the vines that supplied Ste. Michelle, planting grapes and learning the ways of vineyard work while still in school.
“It’s really been a key part of my life,” Wyckoff says.
Long before the family owned the winery, they were helping supply it.
For nearly five decades, the Wyckoffs have been deeply intertwined with the company’s operations, first as growers and eventually as production partners.
“The Wyckoff family has had a very long-term strategic relationship with Ste. Michelle,” Wyckoff says. “For almost fifty years.” That partnership eventually expanded beyond farming. The family operates Coventry Vale, a production facility that quietly produces wine for Ste. Michelle’s brands.
“We’ve been making wine actually for Ste. Michelle for almost fifty years as well,” Wyckoff says.
Unlike most wineries, Coventry Vale does not operate as a consumer-facing destination. Instead, its work happens largely behind the scenes, producing wine and scaling production alongside Ste. Michelle’s growth.
“What we’ve done is grow with Ste. Michelle’s needs,” Wyckoff explains. “Producing wine for them and operating three different wineries for Ste. Michelle.”
That decades-long collaboration also gave Wyckoff a rare vantage point on the company’s leadership and evolution. As a child and teenager, he regularly traveled to the Woodinville château with his father, where meetings with Ste. Michelle executives became almost routine.
“I had the opportunity throughout my life to go to Woodinville and meet with the former CEOs of Ste. Michelle, Allen Shoup and Ted Baseler with my father,” Wyckoff says. “That was almost an annual occurrence.”
When the company’s previous owners began exploring a sale last year, Wyckoff saw an opportunity to bring the winery closer to the people who had helped sustain it for decades.
“We thought it was important that Ste. Michelle be owned by a company or a family that had a longer-term vision,” Wyckoff says.
The acquisition carries symbolic weight. For decades, the winery moved through corporate ownership. Returning it to a Washington family changes that dynamic.
“Our ownership could be transformational,” Wyckoff says. “Returning it to family ownership and grounding it in a family that’s Washington-based and truly understands the wine industry and the grower community.”
That agricultural background shapes how Wyckoff thinks about the winery’s future. Wine, like farming, demands patience.
His grandfather founded the family’s business in 1950, and the lessons of that generational perspective continue to guide the family today.
“Making wine and growing wine grapes really requires a long-term perspective,” Wyckoff says.
For David Bowman, who joined the company after nearly two decades in the wine industry, the winery’s future lies in leaning harder into what makes Washington wine distinctive.
Recently in Chicago, Bowman spent a day moving between restaurants and distributor meetings, pouring Washington wines for sommeliers and trade partners. The trip, Bowman says, felt like the beginning of “what we think of as a new renaissance for Chateau Ste. Michelle.”
Part of Ste. Michelle’s unusual position in the market comes from its long history.The company traces its roots to 1934, with the first vintage labeled Chateau Ste. Michelle appearing in 1967.
“That may not sound that old,” Bowman says, “but if you look at the timeline of Napa Valley, it’s right there.”
Robert Mondavi began making wine under his own label in 1966, and a few years later Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars produced the 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon that would go on to win the 1976 Judgment of Paris.
“We’ve been doing this a while,” Bowman says. Part of Bowman’s pitch is geographical. Washington wine operates under a different set of conditions than California.
While many large American wineries source grapes across multiple regions, Ste. Michelle still draws most of its fruit from a single vast appellation: the Columbia Valley.
The Columbia Valley stretches across eastern Washington, but only a small portion of that land is planted to vines.
“Only about one percent of the land contained in the Columbia Valley is planted to wine grapes,” Bowman says.
That scarcity has shaped the region’s vineyard development. Sites are chosen deliberately, often for specific soil compositions and microclimates that suit particular grape varieties.
“It’s very intentional where grapes are planted,” Bowman explains. “They’re planted to make a certain kind of grape and ultimately a certain kind of wine.”
The economics of the region also set Washington apart. Compared with Napa Valley, land and water remain far less expensive, allowing wineries to pursue higher quality without pushing prices into luxury territory.
That advantage allows Ste. Michelle to operate at scale while still relying on techniques associated with boutique estates.
“Our Chardonnay program is a good example,” Bowman says. “We do small-lot fermentation in small French barrels. Those barrels get stirred once a week by hand.”
“We kind of laugh about it,” he says. “We’re a fifteen-dollar wine with a hundred-dollar pedigree.”
Yet despite its longevity, the winery has spent the past decade navigating shifting consumer tastes and an increasingly crowded wine market.
Bowman believes the next chapter is less about growth than clarity. “I’d like to see our flagship winery regain the confidence and the mystique it had ten years ago,” he says.
That effort includes a renewed focus on Washington’s strengths, particularly Bordeaux varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Bowman believes the region can produce wines that rival California’s best bottles while remaining more accessible in price.
“If we can show up with a fifty-dollar Cabernet that blows people’s mind,” Bowman says, “that’s a pretty exciting opportunity.”
Even as the winery repositions its wines, some aspects of Ste. Michelle’s identity remain unchanged.
The Woodinville estate continues to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The winery’s outdoor amphitheater hosts a summer concert series that is now entering its fortieth season. For many Washington residents, the concerts have become a ritual as much as a wine event. Families spread blankets across the lawn while music drifts across the vineyards.
The experience reflects the winery’s unusual position in American wine culture: large enough to host global music acts, yet still rooted in a specific place.
For Bowman, success would mean elevating Washington’s reputation for serious red wines.
“I’d like to see Washington gain much more recognition for the quality of the Bordeaux varieties we make,” he says.
For Wyckoff, the goal is broader. Success, he says, means strengthening the network of people who make Ste. Michelle possible.
“It’s supporting the holistic community that engages with Ste. Michelle,” Wyckoff says. “The people who work here, the growers who supply fruit, and the partners who help bring these wines to the world.”
