Thursday, October 1, 2026
The Lake Chelan watershed, aside from being one of the most beautiful places on earth, has proven to be a source for some of the finest wines in America. The bottles that come from estate vineyards around Lake Chelan hold their own against any of the best from Napa, Sonoma, Paso Robles and points beyond.
The benchmark vineyard in the area, by most accounts, is the one named with the original Salish word “Tsillan,” which means “deep water.” But don’t pronounce that the way you’re tempted to — it sounds exactly like the word we turned it into: Chelan.
What makes it the benchmark isn’t necessarily just the innumerable awards the winery has won, although inside the tasting room, there’s a veritable shrine’s worth of bottles with medals hanging from their necks. But looking around the rest of the room, you start to get a feel for what it actually is that sets Tsillan Cellars head and shoulders above the rest.
No one expects a tasting room to look like much more than a few tables, a bar, cozy atmosphere and maybe some mood music, with the most popular wines prominently displayed. There’s the menu, on which you’ll find everything sorted into red, white, rosé, sparkling, dessert and fortified wines, further divided among varietals and techniques. Tsillan has all of that, of course. But the tasting room you walk into, carrying with it the Tuscan villa-style architecture of the grounds, is lit in golds and dim whites, letting the sun do most of the work.
It’s here that head winemaker Garrett Grubbs sits to explain what sets Tsillan Cellars apart from the rest when it comes to not just their presentation, but their approach to sustainable winemaking and stewardship of the Lake Chelan watershed, preserving it in the near-pristine condition you find every time you go through Knapp’s Coulee, past Bear Mountain Ranch, and down 97A into the Lake Chelan Valley.
“Inherently, we’re farmers first. There are a lot of groups you can get into, and ‘sustainability’ is a buzzword, of course, but we’re farmers,” Grubbs says. “If we don’t take care of the vines, the land, the soil, the water, we’re not in business. This was all orchards, and the whole south shore was Red Delicious apples when I was a kid.”
He explains that in its 25 years in business, Tsillan has never been overly concerned with putting an extra little logo on their labels. He understands why other wineries may do that, but he feels that what he calls “the lake effect” does all of the talking for them.
“We have a beautiful site here. This is a famous growing area, the south shore of Lake Chelan. We’re closer to the water here than most. We do get the lake effect. If we didn’t sustainably — inherently — take care of the property, take care of the land and vines, it’s not going to produce, and I’m not going to get that authentic grape.”
“We work hard here,” he says, “to not do a lot.”
That doesn’t mean that everyone is sitting around sampling the goods all day. What Grubbs means is that they have invested the time, money and research into practices and technology that allow them to cultivate on this land without leaving much of a footprint at all. Sensors scattered throughout the vineyard alert them to water needs so they never turn it on when they don’t need it.
And though they’re not certified organic or anything — there’s that extra logo that Tsillan eschews — they have the same sort of system set up to alert them of pests. With all of these sensors in place, there’s no longer a need for what Grubbs terms “blanket” watering or spraying. “We just let the water and the land do its thing. That seems pretty sustainable to me,” says Grubbs.
There’s a story to be told about the difference in soil as you travel from Wenatchee proper through the agricultural valleys, and nowhere is it more apparent than when you get up to the Lake Chelan Valley. Where road construction on the Confluence Parkway Project might turn up a khaki, clumpy soil that dries your mouth out just looking at it, a similar road project along 97A or Highway 150 uncovers what appears to be the boxed chocolate pudding mix you remember from your childhood: Rich, soft and fragrant, almost silky to the touch.
“We’re pretty lucky here, even within the area. There’s a lot that went on here back before our time,” he says. By that, of course, he means about 13,000 years ago, when Glacier Peak erupted in an explosion five times the size of Mt. St. Helens’ legendary eruption 45 years ago. The debris and glacial activity from Glacier Peak’s geological paroxysm not only helped form the lake itself, behind only Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe in depth in the United States, but left deposits of pumice sometimes several feet deep along the Manson shores. Lucky indeed.
“We have layers of clay here, there was water up at the level we’re sitting at right now at some point, backed up from the glacier,” he says. “There’s some pretty neat stuff that led to all of this. We lucked out big time.”
When asked whether Tsillan Cellars started out as a business focused on conservation, Grubbs likens it to the old standard wisdom of everyone keeping their lawns green all the time. “You know now what you didn’t know then, right? Times have changed, products have changed, thought processes have changed, so speaking for those who came before me, my dad, my grandpa of what you thought was or wasn’t important … we are stewards of this land and always have been because we’re farmers.”
But he says there are a lot of things they did 25 years ago that they don’t do now. And there are even more things they do now that they didn’t back then. “We’re a lot softer, chemically. We’re a lot easier on water. We could turn on a spigot and just leave it on all year. But we’re not a golf course. We should be getting better and more conscious of it every year.”
And the specifics, though Grubbs keeps humbly insisting that the ethos of conservation is a byproduct of simply wanting to make a superior wine, are pretty impressive. “We have a Wilbur-Ellis scout, a monitor who writes our recommendations for fertilizer, nutrients, a non-invasive spray to combat a pest… We have our water sensors that track 24 hours, by the minute, by the second, the water uptake. Nic (Stevens, the vineyard manager and assistant winemaker) showed us today, on his phone, exactly what the water levels were in the plants. “These roots right here,” Grubbs says, mimicking Nic’s pointing at his phone, “are doing most of the work, and these deeper, older roots are just relaxing. Nic once went almost two months without turning on the water here because they didn’t need it, and we didn’t waste a drop.”
Glyphosate? Not a chance. “We have a mechanical cultivator that hooks up to the tractor that has metal knife edges that senses the post and the vines, and it just chops the weeds, under the soil, and turns it over.”
As far as the harvest, everything’s done by hand. “Our vineyard workers are out there mimicking the canopy, opening the canopy up, using the sunlight, using the wind to dry out the grape clusters or keep the airflow going. It’s what you should be doing and it’s what we do.” They literally manually pick off leaves from the vines to give more exposure to the cooler morning sun, rather than letting them burn in the hot afternoon sun. They’re helping nature do its best work.
“I want to be able to show a consumer what a Cab Sauv from this crop, from this vintage tastes like. This Riesling, this Gewürztraminer,” Grubbs says. “The fact that we do so little and let the grapes that grow here in a rich environment do the work means that we have to add very little to the wine. We use native yeast here. We have a catalog of products that we can legally add and never tell you a single thing we’ve put in there, and we don’t use them. We believe that’s not what you should be doing. We have an authentic product here.”
Consistency and authenticity are the end goal for Tsillan Cellars. No, they haven’t paid the dues and filled out an application and filed paperwork to be part of Sustainable WA It’s not off the table, should the winemakers ever decide to wholesale their products or grapes — a situation where Garrett or Nic wouldn’t be able to sit down and explain that their practices are the same as or better than those required by such groups. In fact, many companies that do get compliance certificates and things like that do only as much as needed to meet the minimum standards of the certification.
But largely, the vineyard’s own philosophy has led them to not just sustainable practices, but a lot of the gold medals you can see around their tasting room.
Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media
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