Meet the Winemakers

Tim and Tracy Nodland, husband and wife, are the winemaking team at Nodland Cellars. Tracy is an artist who loves to paint with oils and Tim is a musician who loves jazz guitar music. In 1999 they made their first barrel of wine together. The next year they made three wines and the year after that five, until they had made 63 wines and had won ribbons and trophies for the wines in local competitions. Tim can’t paint and Tracy can’t sing a note but winemaking was something where they could apply their creative talents as a team. In 2005 they took the winemaking commercial but with the same commitment to quality and cleanliness as they had developed as standard practice for years. The choice to go commercial and to make the wines available to the public was not a business decision but rather a way to make larger batches of wine than before to increase the quality of the final product even more. To the Tim and Tracy, winemaking is an art rather than a science. Wine was never meant to be made in a factory or to become a commodity like corn or peas but rather was intended to be liquid art. Wine was intended to be something that feeds the soul with beauty and grace as does any other art form. The Nodland winery is more like an artist’s studio where grapes are turned into art.

Tracy Nodland, co-winemaker

The Nodland winemaking team has chosen to make very small lots of wine and to use traditional methods like hand selection of clusters, open top fermenters, and natural yeast fermentation followed by a cultured yeast fermentation to create wines with rich and opulent textures.  Winemaking, if it is to be an art form, requires great grapes from outstanding vineyards along with top quality barrels. Then the grapes and wine  must be handled gently from the time the grapes are removed from the vine to the time the wine is put in barrel and eventually into the bottle. Tim and Tracy Nodland have their hand in everything from grape selection to putting each label on every bottle personally.

Tim Nodland, co-winemaker

The Nodlands have no desire to make and offer for sale a dozen different wines. The only goal is to produce one of the very best wines possible in the wonderful and world class grape growing region of Washington State. The artistic palate consists of fruit from the Walla Walla Valley for big dark fruit flavors, from the Yakima Valley for European mineral and dusty components, from Red Mountain for structure and tannin and from other parts of the Columbia Valley for bright fruit and complexity. The choice of French oak barrel is a difficult one because it costs almost three times as much as American oak but really the decision is easy because of the unique and subtle spice and oak flavors that only French oak can produce.

Tim and Tracy Nodland are involved in every step of the winemaking process and these wines are made in very small lots, with the best ingredients, and by hand to ensure the highest quality