The Bubbly Promise Of Arabilis Wines

Is there a doctor in the house?

At Arabilis Wines, there are two. We doubt any winery anywhere could top the educational credentials that Allison and Kenny McMahon bring to the table. They met and completed their graduate work at Washington State University. Allison’s dissertation focused on the sensory evaluation of red wine. Kenny concentrated on sparkling wine, taking a hard look at the impact of sugar additions in the processes of tirage and dosage.

Their path into the wine business was anything but a straight line. Those academic credentials made the couple attractive to employers in other industries. Today they have full-time jobs as user experience researchers. Allison is in the tech industry. Kenny applies himself to the grocery business. Arabilis Wines is a passion project that one day may become a life pursuit for the McMahons.

The Arabilis trajectory hasn’t been linear, either. They made wine from the Willamette Valley in 2018 and 2019, but kept it in bulk while they mulled a direction. By 2020 they thought that the Columbia Gorge might be their future. They had been married in the Gorge the prior year. They loved the landscapes, grapes, and people. The prospect of owning land and living there on an estate vineyard was alluring.

Alas, that was 2020. Did anything go well for anyone that year? Fires and smoke impacted harvest. The McMahons couldn’t find property that fit their purpose. The capital requirements were daunting.

Things have looked up over the past two years. They’ve relocated to the Willamette Valley and pivoted their brand to focus on sparkling wines from the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. New wines are hitting their online shop now. Those sparklers are due to be released in a year. As Allison McMahon reminds herself regularly, patience is a virtue. We caught up with the couple recently to hear more of the Arabilis story. Yours truly was not the smartest person in the room.

The Wine Write: How did you each connect with wine?

Kenny: I grew up in Kentucky and lived there through my undergraduate days. Our home was right outside Cincinnati. Wine was never at the center of the table for us. We had some family friends who were originally from California. They helped introduce my parents to wine.

A memory that sticks with me today happened when I was twelve years old. We were in Napa one foggy morning. Crush was happening. We had scheduled this tour at six in the morning. Fruit was coming off the vineyard. I reached my hand over the picking bin and pulled off some Chardonnay grapes. They tasted amazing! It definitely wasn’t Welch’s. That flavor memory lives with me.

It set me on a path. My journey into wine wasn’t in a linear direction. I did do internships in other industries. I came to understand that wine was a serious passion for me. Tasting those Napa grapes straight off the vine was a trigger point.

Allison: I graduated from college with a degree in Biology. I was living with family friends near Livermore, California and was thinking about higher education, but not quite sold on one path. I would go wine tasting on weekends. It occurred to me that I could study wine and turn that into a career!

I applied to Washington State University to study wine, focusing on chemistry and processing with a particular emphasis on sensory evaluation. I worked under Dr. Carolyn Ross. The rest is history. It is a dream come true to spend my days tasting wine, talking about it, and trying to understand how different processing decisions impact wine and the experience it evokes. While this isn’t my primary career, the opportunity to start our own brand was the next step toward our dream of one day being surrounded by vineyards, experimenting and working to make great wine, and doing it alongside such wonderful people. The wine community here truly is amazing.

The Wine Write: Kenny, I suppose you’ve been asked why a Kentucky boy isn’t making bourbon?

Kenny: I get that all the time. Right after graduate school I did do an internship at Jim Beam and Beam Suntory. A lot of my close friends in Walla Walla were texting me then. I worked at Beam from May to October. I was there for the summer heat. I missed being in the West. I might have worked in bourbon instead of wine. I remember one night being out with friends and blind tasting bourbons. I started calling out the mash bills in each sample. My friends thought I was ridiculous. They wondered how I knew all that. I realized then that maybe I was too close to bourbon. Staying in that job might have put a hurt on me.

The Wine Write: You both have doctorates in wine related areas. Does that help in what you do day to day?

Kenny: It does. Having that knowledge has informed a lot of our decisions. We both went into graduate school thinking we wanted to be winemakers. The food science program at Washington State University really opened our eyes. We realized we could apply our skills in a lot of different industries. That led to me getting that internship at Beam. Allison got one at Nestlé.

We got to see the end to end of processes. We learned to look at things critically. We applied the scientific method to our work. Why were we doing what we were doing? What impact does it have? Is that what we expected? That’s the scientific method in layman’s terms.

Allison’s line of study for her doctorate was focused on red wine. She studied the wine’s finish and how that impacts quality. She looked at adjusting tannin levels and alcohol levels, and how that impacts the length of the finish and the wine’s aromas and flavor compounds.

My dissertation concentrated on sparkling wine. I looked closely at the two points of that production process where sugar was added: the tirage and the dosage. Both are critical parts of the final wine. You’re adding sugar back for carbonation in the bottle. You’re adjusting that final sensory profile.

It was a great program. That education set the foundation for us. Questions like what difference an extra week of hang time would make for a wine, or what a four day cold soak would do could be analyzed. Should we even do a cold soak? We challenge ourselves with those questions. Allison will bring me back to reality, because I want to do everything. Having that discipline keeps us methodical and focused. It becomes our own review process.

Allison: I think it’s influenced the way we approach winemaking decisions, incorporating systematic differences to learn something with the decisions we make. On a high level, the doctorate program was one way to get good practice at project management, time management, attention to detail, learning to take responsibility for a body of work, and for getting the perseverance to see things through.

The Wine Write: You both have very astutely kept your day jobs. Can you talk a bit about those?

Kenny: We are both user experience researchers. Allison is in tech. I work for a big grocery company, Kroger. As I mentioned, our doctorate program opened us up to all sorts of vocational options. Covid was an enabler for helping us launch Arabilis, because we both are fully remote with our day jobs. We work through our lunches. In our off hours, we can be out in a vineyard or in the winery.

User research looks at how we can empathize with consumer problems or needs. We help develop solutions for those issues. A big problem that came about from Covid was the inability to get into a physical grocery store. Grocery delivery really dialed up as a result. That impacted a lot of people. Products were more accessible. Product accessibility is a big issue these days.

The Wine Write: I understand those jobs took you to the East Coast for awhile.

Kenny: Allison and I actually wrote a business plan for a wine brand in 2016. We had just moved to New Jersey for our early careers. Those jobs kept us entrenched on the East Coast. A number of friends would text us during harvest with pictures. They wished we were there with them during crush. We began to think more about making wine. We realized that if we didn’t do it, we’d always wonder where that path may have led us. Allison is a saint for diving headfirst into this. By getting her job out West, we were able to join hands in this passion.

The Wine Write: Kenny, I noticed your internships with Morgan Lee and Erica Orr. Can you talk a bit about the impacts they had on you?

Kenny: Both of them are dear friends. Morgan took a real chance on me. I had quit my job on the East Coast when Allison got that opportunity to move back West. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I thought I should do a harvest. I was rusty. I needed to see things at scale. Morgan is from Indiana. We connected really closely. That was an amazing experience for me. He made so many different wines. We were pulling a lot of different levers. We might do whole cluster Syrah for one wine. We’d de-stem for another. We might ferment Cabernet in open top French oak. He allowed me to ask a lot of questions about why we did what.

The other key item was how many top vineyards he had as fruit sources. We had a three man team that year, including Morgan, and we processed one hundred fifty tons of fruit. It was pretty crazy. There were some long, cold days. A lot of that fruit came from Eastern Washington. We were picking until mid November.

The connection to Erica came from Morgan. She did all of the wine chemistry analysis for him. I reached out to her after harvest was done. I loved her wines and the wines she made for Baer. She went to U.C.-Davis and has all the credentials. She started out with Cathy Corison, which says a lot. I wanted to pick her brain. We were considering launching our brand then. I knew she could pick another intern, but I really wanted to work with her. She in turn wanted to know why I was looking at her, given my doctorate degree. I told her I was still learning. I didn’t have her years of experience. I told her it would be a huge value-add to work with her. She brought me on.

I worked in her lab. I helped with the Baer wines and with her own brand. That exposure was really instructive. She is hyper-focused. She knows how the chemical parameters impact a finished wine. She knows how to best prepare wines for bottling. We had so many conversations about winemaking. We got really nerdy. We’d pop certain wines over lunch, and have conversations around them. We’d ask what those producers were doing, why they were doing it, and what was happening in the wine profiles.

Erica is very humble. She won’t put her name out there, but she is an indirect but very powerful influence in Woodinville wine. This is her twenty-fifth vintage. She’s refined things now to the point where she could do this in her sleep. I’m so glad to have worked with her.

The Morgan Lee and Erica Orr experiences provided quite a launch pad for me. I’m now working alongside Scott Sabbadini while moonlighting at Björnson. That’s been fantastic. He’s worked all over the world, including stints at Fieldstone and Domaine Roy.

The Wine Write: When did you start making wine on your own?

Kenny: We’ve been sleeping on inventory for awhile. We started making wine in 2018. It sat as bulk wine while we figured out what we were going to blend up. Both the 2018 and 2019 wines sat as bulk.

We got married in 2019 in the Columbia Gorge. We’ve always liked the Gorge. In graduate school we’d go there and hike. That whole area is unbelievable. The juxtaposition between the extremes is what got me. The people there were so loose and chill. We loved the Analemma wines. We knew there was a lot of buzz around Hiyu. Other young producers were going there. I had worked with some of that fruit at Underwood. I had also seen fruit from there come through Erica’s lab. The chemistry looked so good, especially for sparkling wine. We thought we would look for property in the Gorge. We thought that’s where we might be.

In 2020 we were looking to begin our sparkling wine program. Ultimately that’s where we wanted to hang our hat for the brand. During that season we decided to make some still wine from the Columbia Gorge, both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. As the 2020 harvest arrived, we began picking fruit in late August and early September. It was hot and dry all over the state.

When wildfires started spreading out all over the West Coast, our still wine fruit was still on the vine. When the inversion happened in mid-September, the air pushed the smoke down and east from the Pacific Ocean into the Willamette Valley and the Gorge. There were fires popping up everywhere. The air quality was horrible.

One of our vineyard managers ended up starting to pick the grapes that would become our 2020 Pinot Noir right before the inversion of smoke arrived at the vineyard. We had no idea how bad it was going to get. By the time we finished loading the fruit, you couldn’t see one hundred yards in front of you.

There is a drawbridge that crosses the Columbia River from White Salmon to Hood River. You couldn’t see the counterweights of the lift until you were directly under them. The smoke was that thick. We smelled like a campfire when we got back home.

It was a challenging vintage. We treated it as an experimental wine. We made the Pinot in a different style than we would have otherwise. It was totally whole cluster, quick fermentation, neutral oak, and unfined and unfiltered. We’re happy with how it turned out.

We are selling it through the website. We also sold a number of cases to the Seattle International Film Festival as a glass pour for their theaters and to the Wines by Cougs wine club. We certainly don’t want 2020 to happen again, but we can truly say that we grew a lot that year both personally and in terms of the winery.

The Wine Write: It sounds like the Columbia Gorge wasn’t meant to be for Arabilis.

Kenny: We looked at it hard in 2020. The site we were looking at was too small for us. It would have been a very big investment. We came to realize just how many good vineyards there are in the Willamette Valley. There is a lot more Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, and Pinot Noir being planted. It was sort of a no brainer to focus on the Willamette Valley for Arabilis. We want to be in and around the Eola-Amity Hills AVA.

The Wine Write: Tell me about launching the brand.

Kenny: 2021 was the year. We had all that inventory we had sat on while we did all the other stuff. We designed the label with Gatto Rivera Branding out of Napa. A big shout out to them. They really hit the essence of what we wanted to do.

The 2018 Pinot Noir was in bottle for a year before we released it. Ours was sort of like the Burgundy schedule where you get that extended bottle aging. We’re doing the same thing for the 2019. It will be released in a few months. There has been a lot of time and capital investment leading up to these releases. And that’s not even considering the sparkling wines.

We wanted the wines to be good. The 2020 Chardonnay is on that edge of freshness and minerality. It has really delicate tropical notes. We just bottled up the 2021 Chardonnays from a couple of single vineyards. We could not be happier with them.

The Wine Write: Are you shifting the focus more toward single vineyard wines?

Kenny: No. Our 2018 and 2019 Pinot Noirs are vintage wines. They’re blends. The 2018 was sourced from Sojeau Vineyard and Cristom’s Eileen Vineyard. Those are two Grand Cru level sites in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA. As a new brand we were unsure how to best label that wine to get shelf recognition. We kept it as “Willamette Valley”. We did that for the 2019, too. That one has Sojeau and Zenith Vineyard fruit from the Eola-Amity Hills, along with a kiss of fruit from the Chehalem Mountains AVA.

We are really trying to represent what a grower champagne producer can be over here. We get inspiration from small growers in Champagne like Cédric Bouchard, Clemence Lelarge, Gaspard Brochet, Arthur Larmandier, Anselme Selosse, Frederic Savart, Emmanuel Lassaigne, Benoit Lahaye, and Fabrice Gass. When they make a still wine, it could be a monopole, or it could be a blend. The still wines we make in the future will likely be blends, but they won’t skimp on fruit.

This year we will have a single vineyard Sojeau as our only red wine. We are getting some Pinot Noir from Björnson Vineyard, but I think it will all go into sparkling wine. Our vision is to eventually be ninety percent sparkling wine. We’ll make a couple of still wines to accompany those.

The Wine Write: Why sparkling wine?

Kenny: Sparkling wine fosters memories. That memory may be of popping a bottle during a celebration of a big life event like buying a new house or christening a new boat (do they still do that?), or it could be something simple like drinking sparkling with catfish or fried chicken. Sparkling wines don’t have to be limited to celebrations. There’s no doubt that sparkling wine, especially Champagne, has grown as a category with tremendous velocity over the past decade. Sparkling wines are versatile. They can be put on the table for any meal of the day. I think there’s even more space for expansion for sparklings.

I mentioned all those inspirational small growers in Champagne. I wrote to them early on in our journey, seeking advice. I could not believe how open and candid they were with me. These are some heavy hitters from across the region. They gave us a lot of great ideas for which we are so grateful.

Reflecting back to graduate school, I pitched the project to my advisor, Dr. Carolyn Ross. We were being explorative. We wanted to uncover answers that would directly influence the sparkling wines coming into the domestic marketplace. We’re just as enthusiastic about sparkling wine now as we were then.

The Wine Write: When are your first sparkling wines to be released?

Kenny: The fall of 2023 will be our first release for them. That wine will be a 2020 Columbia Gorge. It’s sixty-seven percent Pinot Noir and thirty-three percent Chardonnay. It’s really fresh. It’s just starting to turn the corner to get those tertiary tones. Our Coast Range 2020 is the complete opposite. It’s sixty-seven percent Chardonnay and thirty-three percent Chardonnay. That wine has laser minerality. It’s tight and reductive right now. I think it will need another six months beyond the release of the Gorge sparkling next fall.

The Wine Write: What’s the sales model?

Kenny: We are direct to consumer. We’re currently vetting the process for a distribution partner. We’re new to this and don’t have many wines to offer now. A lot of people in distribution want to know if we have a glass pour sparkling wine. That’s going to be a tough target to hit. It’s something that’s in the back of our minds. For now we are wholly direct to consumer and self distributed in Oregon and Washington.

I think we’ll be in the fifty dollar range for the sparkling wines. We made three sparkling wines in 2021. I hope to have one that will be a hair less in price. That would make it more approachable to more customers. We realize that there are some great champagnes out there for the price.

Allison: We can ship to nearly every state direct. We are self-distributed locally and across the Pacific Northwest. We’re also looking to expand our reach and get our name out there.

The Wine Write: One of the interesting things I saw on your website was selling the wines in a three pack.

Kenny: A good friend of mine in graduate school was Taylor Oswald. He’s the winemaker now at Echolands Winery. He would always tell me to buy a three pack of wine. His reasoning was that we would open one tonight. Two years from now we would open another when we graduated. The third one I could keep to open whenever I wanted. That made total sense to me.

That’s what we wanted to do. We are trying to educate our customers on the concept. Three bottles is enough if you want to do a party. Having three bottles and drinking over time allows people to see the evolution of our wines. Our wines have good potential to age. We pick early, so they have nice freshness, tannin structure, and acidity. We’re hoping our customers try them over time. That’s the intent behind the three packs.

Allison: Our model has been to ship in multiples of three bottles. This makes sense to me in terms of efficiency and the shipping footprint. We may provide more flexibility to our customers in the future.

The Wine Write: Was it difficult getting into some of the premier vineyards from which you source?

Kenny: We were in the right place at the right time. Leaning on our best friends enabled us access to some of the best sites in this region. That was a launch pad toward quality winemaking. I believe that good people plus good fruit equates easy winemaking. Many of these growers took a chance on us. We are deeply grateful. They helped give our business legitimacy.

While we are very involved in the vineyards, I know I’m not the farmer. There are incredibly talented, hard working people at every one of these properties. I want to learn from them. It’s a collaboration, especially as we get close to harvest. We want to work with people we trust. These growers are the stewards of the subtleties you will see in our wines. We aren’t farmers yet, but we chose our brand name for that connection. Arabilis is the Latin word for farmable land. That’s where this all starts.

Allison: Kenny is old school. He cold called everyone he could. He went out to shake hands to expand our network. That has benefitted us, and it’s also helped the people he’s met. People ask him how he knows so many people. When he’s off the clock for his day job, he’s either reading about wine, calling or texting people about wine, watching You Tube videos about wine, or thinking and planning future winemaking concepts. He is super passionate.

Kenny: We got in on some vineyards early on. Pearlstad Vineyard is one of those. I think this year is their sixth leaf. We’ve been in there for two or three years. We got in it through a contract that wasn’t going to be renewed by another winery. I think we started with about five tons. We try to help vineyards out by establishing ourselves as good customers. Getting a good allocation early and often helps do that.

I’m constantly out there meeting growers and vineyard managers. I like establishing those relationships. There are three vineyards coming on line next year that excite me. Those will give me a lot more blending material.

The Wine Write: Where would you like to take Arabilis in terms of case production?

Kenny: We’d like to get to two thousand cases. That may be a long road. We hope to do about seven hundred cases this year. The goal would be to increase that to a thousand cases in 2023. Those three new vineyards will help get us there.

The Wine Write: Do you offer hospitality options?

Kenny: We’re making the wines at Björnson. We connected with the Björnsons right away. They’ve been amazing in helping us get ingrained in the Eola-Amity Hills. I empathize with their wine journey a lot. We can do tastings here. We can do a tour of the place. I’m always open to people who want to share a glass.

The Wine Write: What’s the biggest lesson learned so far in this journey?

Kenny: We’re just starting out. We are standing on the shoulders of so many people who helped get us here. We’ve learned some hard lessons. 2020 was a lesson in itself. We’re still selling through that 2020 red wine. It was a good, conscious choice to keep that relationship with the grower. As we continue to grow, we need to be methodical about capital. This is an industry that is capital intensive. We want to be very careful in terms of investments moving forward. It’s just my wife and me. There are no outside investors other than customers who buy our wines. We appreciate all of them supporting our dream.

Allison: Patience is a virtue. This endeavor takes time, so we constantly have to remind ourselves that the horse goes before the cart!

Allison and Kenny McMahon are learning a lot of lessons as they journey with wine. Their formal education at Washington State University gave them a solid foundation. Mentorships with top winemakers provided practical answers to problems and gave them role models for both experimentation and discipline in the winery. Old school behaviors like cold calling, shaking hands, and staying in touch with people helped put Arabilis Wines on solid footing.

Want another observation about the couple? They’re grounded. Rather than move all their chips in to chase their wine dream, they are taking the slower road. Day jobs are good. Speculative, exorbitant capital investments on vineyard property are not. The pair are paying their own way as first generation vintners.

This is a winery to watch. The owners are smart and savvy. They’re well trained. They’ve been influenced by some of the best people in the business. They’re going about things the right way. And did we mention they’re already in some of the premier Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vineyards in the Pacific Northwest?

Planning a trip to the Willamette Valley? There are few more fun experiences than to make a private appointment with folks like the McMahons. It would be a personal wine tasting you’ll never forget. If you’re not fortunate enough to be visiting anytime soon, check out the couple via the Arabilis website and Instagram page. Lots of fun there. There’s even a wine shop where you can select your very own three pack. That’s just what the doctor(s) ordered.

Arabilis Wines / The Wine Write