Et Fille Wines is a small, family-run, Oregon winery specializing in pinot noir. Et Fille, which means "and daughter", honors the hand-in-hand, father and daughter team that makes these wines.
Father Howard began making Oregon wine in 1984. He started creating wine as a hobby while he was a software engineer by day. Soon his passion was fueled and he began taking classes, winning competitions, and helping local winemakers sort and process grapes. In return for helping other winemakers, Howard was granted access to grapes for his own winemaking and was able to work with several vineyards throughout many vintages.
Daughter Jessica first helped make the wine in 2000 as a passion aside from her day job as a biotechnology marketer. In 2003, we joined forces and started Et Fille together.
Our goal is to find the best vineyards in the Northwest, and make a style of wine that reflects the best that each vineyard has to offer. We each bring our scientific backgrounds and love of art to making wine, because it requires both. We personally touch the grape clusters, fermenters, barrels, and bottles that eventually become our wine. We always sort, punch-down, and top-off by hand. We deal in small lots of grapes (so that we can get just the clones we want), small fermentation lots (which gives us enhanced flexibility in our winemaking), and small oak barrels (which can help in the wine's complexity). We believe that having the two of us involved in each stage of the winemaking process allows us to bring two perspectives- and two palates- to our wines. For us, two is better than one.
The Et Fille logo - consisting of the two holding hands - was designed by Michael Dudok de Wit, whose short animated film, Father and Daughter, won the 2000 Academy Award.
