We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kelsey Albro Itämeri. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kelsey below.
Hi Kelsey, thanks for joining us today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your business and how did you resolve those issues?
I started my winery, itä wines, in July of 2019. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the winemaking process – it takes some time! My first harvest was that fall, and I made 6 wines, with production skewed a bit toward my two white wines and rosé, since those are able to get to market with less aging than red wines. My winery is in a small incubator building in Walla Walla, WA and we don’t see a lot of visitors in the winter, so my big plan was to make the wines in the fall, fix up my tasting room and bottle the whites and rosé in the winter, and then open the tasting room in Spring of 2020. March of 2020 was going to be our big entry onto the wine stage – I’d go to Taste Washington in Seattle in mid-March, where thousands of people would have the chance to see the brand and try the wines before returning to Walla Walla and having the grand opening the following weekend. As we all now know, 2020 had other plans for us. Taste Washington was cancelled due to COVID, and the Washington State lockdown was enacted the following weekend.
I had no customers, no brand presence in the market, no distribution, not a single person had tried the wines… no idea what I was going to do. And it didn’t help that we were all at a loss at that point about how the virus spread, how long lockdowns would last and/or what the regulations and recommendations would be from week to week. So, I just started putting one foot in front of the other. I emailed the folks who had signed up for our e-mail newsletter (mostly college friends, folks I grew up with, people I used to babysit for – and their parents) and sold some wine that way, started posting on Instagram, reached out to some local wine shops and learned how to hustle social-distance-style. Come June, I was able to open for outdoor tastings only and began to get a little bit of word of mouth from customers who had actually tried the wines and brought them to their frigid backyard COVID cafés to share with friends and neighbors, I got a few nice reviews, I sent a lot of hand written thank you notes. It was progress, but it was slow and honestly the knocks didn’t stop coming just because I could pour wine on the uncovered front patio of my winery – we had heat domes to deal with in the summer, wind and rain and snow in the fall and winter, and supply chain delays on any little thing that might help mitigate those problems.
The lows were low – it felt like I would never get a break or be able to build up any momentum, but the highs were really high. Making something with your hands and sharing it with someone who really loves it, getting a good review, or a wine club sign up was such a huge affirmation at a time when it felt like maybe I had really made a stupid choice getting into this crazy business!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
itä wines Owner and Winemaker, Kelsey Albro Itämeri, came to winemaking via a long and winding road. After graduating from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 2009, she wore a lot of hats: political campaign manager, reality TV production assistant and coordinator, executive assistant at Lionsgate Studios, sales and development manager at natural foods companies, and some heady days as a bartender, bar manager, and food & beverage director for a bar group in San Francisco.
Ready to settle down and tired of spending 50% of her income on rent, Kelsey looked north to her homeland of Washington State. Originally from Seattle, Kelsey and her husband, Kai, decided to try out the sunny side of the state where her family had purchased land in the foothills of the Blue Mountains just outside of Walla Walla. They spent the first year on the farm moving handline in the alfalfa fields, taking care of a test plot of grapevines and tree fruit, and finding jobs at local wineries.
In 2017 Kelsey enrolled in Walla Walla Community College’s Institute for Enology & Viticulture and supplemented her classroom learning with internships at Balboa Winery and The Walls Vineyards in Walla Walla. After graduation, she travelled to Burgundy to learn more about terroir and how to drink wine at lunch and still get work done. During her internship at Domaine Jean Charton in the village of Puligny-Montrachet, she learned all of that and gained a deep appreciation for site-specific vineyard management and winemaking.
Kelsey founded itä wines in 2019 in the hopes of bringing those lessons to the unique vineyards of the eastern foothills of the Walla Walla Valley. She only sources grapes from the eastern foothills of the Blue Mountains, as close to her family farm as possible, with the eventual goal of producing only estate wines on that land. These hillsides produce lighter-bodied wines with racy acidity, and her low-impact winemaking style reflects that via early pick dates, restrained use of oak and minimal fining and filtration.
Since the release of her inaugural vintage in 2020, itä wines has been named a “2023 Winery to Watch” by Wine & Spirits and Kelsey was named one of Wine Enthusiast’s “Future 40” in 2024. Wines from itä have garnered many 90+ point ratings from publications such as Wine Enthusiast, Decanter, Wine & Spirits and Sean Sullivan’s Northwest Wine Report. Itä wines has also been covered by JancisRobinson.com, Sunset Magazine, The New Wine Review, United Airlines’ Hemispheres Magazine, Seattle Met, The Puget Sound Business Journal, and SevenFifty Daily.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
I mean, if you’re doing it right, wine shouldn’t be an overly “manufactured product,” but, yes I do make the wine that I sell.
I learned how to make wine – or at least started the process, since it is a pursuit best followed over the course of several lifetimes – prior to starting my business. I interned at Balboa Winery here in Walla Walla, and then enrolled at the Walla Walla Community College Institute of Enology & Viticulture to learn more about the science of winemaking and viticulture. I also managed a small test plot of grapes that is grown on my parent’s property and made wine with those grapes in my garage/basement during my studies and after. I also interned at The Walls Vineyards here in Walla Walla, and at Domaine Jean Chartron in Puligny-Montrachet in Burgundy, France. So I definitely had some solid experience under my belt prior to starting the winery, but every vintage is different!
Logistically, I had to cobble together the means of production in order to get the grapes crushed and pressed. Our first vintage, 2019, was made entirely at a custom crush facility down the road from my winery incubator since we signed the lease in July of 2019 and a government shutdown made it impossible to get our bond from the TTB and then our license from the WSLCB prior to harvest (both of which you need to legally produce alcohol). So that year the grapes arrived at that facility, were crushed and fermented on the skins (for red wines) or pressed and fermented off the skins (for white wines), aged in barrel, and were bottled at that facility. I made the pick calls, and all of the decisions about processing and fermentation management, but had the support of the staff and tools available at that facility.
One of the unforeseen upsides to doing production this way was that it kept me from having to finance and capitalize my own equipment (a wine press can be over $100K, for example), but I missed having more control over the wine and honestly wanted it “home” aka at my winery so that I could fuss over my wine babies as much as I wanted. So, starting in 2020 I found a middle ground – I started working with a nearby winery, Devona, to crush and press the grapes, and then brought the grapes and/or juice back to my winery for fermentation and aging. It’s hard for me to overstate how important this relationship has become for the success of itä and my growth as a winemaker. John Abbott, the winemaker at Devona, has become a friend and mentor over the past 5 years – offering guidance and knowhow while still respecting my very different winemaking style.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Honestly, I kind of had to unlearn being an asshole. Prior to moving to Walla Walla and entering the world of wine, I had worked in LA in reality TV production and then at Lionsgate Studios as an assistant, and then I worked at a natural foods start up in the Bay Area that sounded really idyllic on paper, but was a poster child for toxic bro hustle culture. Winning at any cost, never taking no for an answer, and treating people like shit if it got you ahead were all rewarded in those jobs. Nuance, a deft touch, long-term relationships, not so much.
Then I moved to Walla Walla, WA aka small town USA and that shit was NOT going to work here… and it also was not who I wanted to be (part of why I moved here in the first place!). I moved here to have a life and do work that was thoughtful and deliberate and sustainable. It was helpful to detox a bit with quiet solitary work in the vineyard, but I had a moment at the beginning of my time at WWCC Institute of Enology & Viticulture that was very crystallizing for me about what my mindset and strategy needed to be. Let’s just say that the first day of wine school at a community college in rural Washington is a very interesting social dynamic – you have sommeliers that want to get into production, retirees that love wine and have lots of time and money on their hands, 18 year olds from Walla Walla whose parents are in wine production or viticulture, folks that are there because it just seemed like a good idea. People who know very little about wine, people who know something about wine, and then people who think they know like REALLY A LOT about wine. In one of the first lectures, there was a student that seemed hell bent on showing how much they already knew – as if we weren’t all there paying tuition to actually learn! And I just remember thinking that I absolutely did not move all this way just to play that game again, just on a different court. I don’t want to jockey for attention, I don’t want to yell just to be heard, I don’t want to sell something to someone who doesn’t want it. I just want to make honest wine, in an honest way, and sell it to people who like it. Full stop. No games.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://itawinery.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itawinery/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itawinery
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/itä-wines-walla-walla
Image Credits
Amber Fouts of Feed it Creative