Farming first
Fruit from our own Ribbon Ridge vines and from growers across the Willamette Valley, the Columbia Gorge and Walla Walla who farm with the same care.
Winemaker and proprietor
Piper Underbrink
A geologist who became a winemaker. She reads a vineyard from the soil up, then picks the method that will show it best.
A boat on a Minnesota lake.
Piper was born in Minnesota. Her summers were spent on a lake there, watching her father restore classic wooden boats with his hands: stripping them back, finding what was sound, building them up again.
One of those boats was named The Sea Lyon. When Piper started a label of her own, she gave it that name. Sealionne is the same idea in a bottle: take something good, understand how it was made, and make it your own.
From the boat to the cellar.
She grew up between that lake, a few years living on a boat in the Abacos, and the Florida coast. At Middlebury College in Vermont she studied geology, which still shapes how she picks a site and reads a block.
Her winemaking started at Flowers on the Sonoma Coast and continued at Joseph Phelps in Napa Valley. She helped open an urban winery and spent time in distilling, where she learned what a good story can and cannot do for what is in the glass.
In 2020 she and her husband, Ben, moved to Newberg. She also makes the wines of Privé Vineyard, her estate project. When she is not in the vineyard she is usually on skis or a bike.
The vineyard decides. The method follows.
Stems in or out
Kilig is fully destemmed. Lvtetia, Tencendur and Floyd keep a third of their clusters whole for spice and lift.
Skins, steel, clay
A day on the skins for Halcyon. Stainless steel for freshness. Clay amphora for the Phoque rosé. French oak, mostly neutral, where it helps.
Nothing wasted
The Viognier skins left after pressing Dalí go straight into the Syrah ferment that becomes Floyd.
