Meet the winemaker

Tim Nodland, is the winemaker at Nodland Cellars. Tim is also a professional musician who loves jazz guitar music and plays in the neo-swing band “Timmy Swift and the Swingin’ Vinos”. In 1999 he made the first barrel of wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon. The next year he made three wines and the year after that five, until he had made 63 wines and had won ribbons and trophies for the wines in local competitions. In 2005 the winemaking went commercial. 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 Tim 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 musician’s studio where grapes are turned into art and into wines that sing like a beautiful melody.

Time Nodland - Winemaker

The Nodland wines are made in very small lots of wine and using 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 has his hand in everything from grape selection to putting each label on every bottle personally.

Tim Nodland, Winemaker

Nodland Cellars has no desire to make and offer for sale a dozen different wines. The only goal is to produce a few 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.