The Fizz #68: Vivianne Kennedy is making single variety wines in Oregon, fueled by the chance to give back to the LGBTQ+ community
In this issue, RAM Cellars winemaker Vivianne Kennedy and I speak about single variety Roussane and Cinsault, how she approaches self-distribution, and building a business that gives back.
For the 68th issue of The Fizz, I spoke with RAM Cellars winemaker Vivianne Kennedy. RAM Cellars is based out of SE Portland, Oregon, and focuses on making single varietal wines from grapes that might be a little unexpected for the region. In this issue, we speak about the different varieties she works with, how changes in the 2020 growing season impacted her choices, and how she centers giving back to the community in her work as a winemaker and winery owner.
Vivianne has built a business centered on community with growers, fellow winemakers, consumers, and non-profits. She’s a dedicated and curious winemaker who isn’t afraid to play around with new varieties or respond to the pressures of a changing west coast climate. I’m so excited to support this maker who continues to use her platform and business to give back to social causes that matter to her, partnering with non-profits like local Portland Q Center and the national Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Margot: I’d love to learn a little about your history. Did you grow up in wine or drinking wine? Was wine a part of your background?
Vivianne: It wasn’t. I grew up on the Idaho/Washington border. I came to fall in love with wine and the production of it through the consumer lens. I really did not start drinking wine until my mid twenties. I have some friends that live in Washington wine country over in the Yakima Valley, and I was up there for a spring barrel event where they do a combined ticket and there are 65 possible wineries that you could visit.
I happened to be doing a return visit to one of my favorite wineries, Kiona, up on Red Mountain, Washington. They were doing barrel sampling of Cabernet Franc aged in four different oak treatments, new and neutral French-American oak, etc. They were tasting us on each of those and talking about what they have previously done for their blending program. That was really interesting to me. I sort of went down the rabbit hole with Glen, one of their winemakers at that time, and we lost track of time. I became aware of my surroundings again after about 90 minutes and looked at him and went, how long have the other people been gone?
I walked out of the cellar into the sunlight and it hit me upside the head, like a ton of bricks, that there was a deep interest there, which developed into a deep love of the confluence of art and science behind wine production. This was in 2008.
Margot: Amazing. How did you get to the point of starting to make wine for yourself?
Vivianne: I had been working in a career for six years at that point and thought okay, I’m going to change the course of my life and bend my life around this arc because it feels like if I am feeling this much passion behind wine, then it's worthwhile to pursue it. I did a couple of professional certificate programs through Washington State University. At that time I was at their agriculture buildings out in Prosser, Washington, which was amazing. They have a research vineyard right there as well. So the stuff that I had access to, it was really incredible.
Ste. Michelle brands threw a whole bunch of money at a fancy wine science center along the Columbia and the tri-cities, and that's lovely and state of the art, but I wouldn't trade the hands-on work that I got in Prosser for anything. I had to be on a waiting list for a couple years to get into the winemaking program, so I did the viticulture program first and was doing my hybridized coursework between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM and on the weekends to squeeze it all in. Especially when I was in the heavy chemistry stuff, I remember falling asleep with my chemistry textbook on my face [laughs].
That work was over the course of a few years. I started in 2009 all the way through the end of 2014. I also did a whole bunch of volunteer work and relatively low paid work for several wineries between Forest Grove, Portland, and Prosser as well. Then ended up getting on at Enso, another Portland urban winery, from the harvest of 2013 through the end of 2018. I was able to start RAM Cellars while I was there. I started out as a harvest intern and stayed on and largely taken over the wine production side of things and part of being able to compensate me fully was working it out to trade my labor and work for grapes.
I brought in a tiny amount of Cab Franc and Malbec in 2014, and then a little bit of Riesling and Pinot Gris to do a white blend. The wines were available for release into the marketplace in early 2016, and then I literally hit the streets with bottles in hands trying to convince folks to sell my wine in a very saturated Oregon wine marketplace.
Margot: I love to see Oregon winemakers do more with different grape varieties that might be unexpected in their area. You work with Gruner, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and others. Why the choice to branch out in that way?
Vivianne: Some of the initial grape choices that I made, like working with Malbec and Cabernet Franc, those were varietals that I had dearly loved from the consumer side and had access to initially. My running joke was that in the event that all of this goes horribly wrong, I can stand having a quarter pallet of this in my garage and have to drink it to make it go away. Thinking about the market saturation here and the number of producers that are doing incredible things that are showcasing Pinot Noir and Chardonnay—it's really lovely stuff and I have so much respect for those producers. We do a little bit of work with some Chardonnay and some Pinot Noir as well, they're interesting grapes to work with. They're some of the most finicky children in the cellar.
But early on it got me thinking. How we can use these opportunities and connection points with our growers to source varietals that folks may not have had the chance to try as a single varietal wine? Counoise, for example, which we were able to track down through a vineyard in Washington that we ended up working with because we lost out on a contract in 2021. The combination of lower yields and greater demand from a really rough 2020 season out here meant that some of our usual sources got pretty unstable from 2020 to 2021.
Sources also opened the door to some Counoise, Cinsault, and Roussane from that site, which I love to have that aha moment with, sharing the wines with folks and talking about these off the beaten path varietals. It can be an exciting point of discovery for consumers to have the opportunity to try single varietal wines from grapes that they might only typically see in blends.
I love getting folks off the beaten path to talk about these other varietals and see what kind of wines they can make stylistically, and then talk about why they were such important components of blends as well, because of the things that they bring as single varietal wines as well.
Margot: How do you find those grapes? Are you seeking out certain varieties specifically? What is your relationship like with your growers?
Vivianne: That's been a fun one over the years because right now I feel like we have got it dialed in from all of that instability in 2020. The wildfires out here, the frost in the first week of September, all of the fruit that we contracted for was compromised because of heavy wildfire smoke. We had to replace everything at that point, which is going to make any other vintage seem easy by comparison. In 2021, when we lost out on some of our Oregon Pinot Noir and Tempranillo, I had already done the entire last minute scramble and had some additional connection points looking for these varietals. It is seeking out growers that are working with a broader cross-section of varietals, but then also building strong long-term relationships.
We've had opportunities come up for fruit that we wanted to work with, that when we initially embarked on that relationship with these specific growers, that fruit was not available. But through continued year in year out support of each other, those doors have opened to get our hands on first.
In 2022, I was very excited because we were able to actually bring in enough Counoise and Cinsault to do significant, large enough releases of those single varietal wines that we can hopefully offer them outside of just the Oregon market. The amounts that are available out there may not be enough to do more than like a wine club only release.
I have a network of other small Oregon winemakers that are friends of mine who have a sporadic group chat around opportunities for fruit. We try to help each other find and source things, which comes in handy. We help each other find replacements for things. The biggest touchpoint that has allowed us to track down some of the varietals that we want to work with and find these opportunities to showcase these off the beaten path varietals has been centering community.
Margot: I love that, that winemaking community building is so important. There's a section on your website that says that you tend to pick earlier than a lot of winemakers in your area. I think that's not uncommon. I hear that a lot now from winemakers especially on the west coast and I wonder if that's a response to climate change—like we're looking to make fresher wines, or if it's a stylistic thing that people are now looking for. Can you talk about that?
Vivianne: I think it's both. In that 2020 year of smoke, an additional side conversation started happening about whether this is a part of our future in the industry. Even the terminology pre-2020, everyone talked about it through the reference of smoke taint, and I've seen that conversation shift to smoke impact. If we have smoke impacted grapes, what are going to be the best ways to handle those?
There have been a lot of robust conversations from the production side on how to best mitigate that, which includes picking earlier, getting things off the skins as soon as possible, making the choice to make white wines with impacted red grapes, getting them off the skins immediately. Picking a little bit earlier allows us to preserve the acidity of the wines, which I think in my opinion helps to elevate the food pairing potential. I love the concept and have more recently low key been obsessed with the concept of trying to craft wines under 12% ABV.
I think there's a place in the marketplace for lower ABV wines, which for what I want to do stylistically, that is literally the best of both worlds because it's also preserving that acidity and offering these bright acid forward wines where food pairing potentials with the right acidity level are just off the charts. It's opening up the possibility for great combinations of food with the wines. As part of that, we certainly have some varietals that we allow longer hang time, like our Roussane is one that we end up picking at a sugar level that we typically would expect for a bigger red.
The way that the grape carries it, and it's not a terribly acidic grape to begin with, full development happens if we give it that hang time and pick at a higher sugar level. There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but we craft that plan based on knowledge gained from communication with other winemakers, but also working knowledge from previous vintages of how specific varietals have handled the confluence of sugar and acid. We tend to make more acid forward wines.
Margot: Do you make a single varietal Roussane?
Vivianne: We do. We were only able to get enough to make one barrel as a white wine. We had done some of it as an orange wine to go into a blend that we made. We had it available for five weeks and it was gone, so we upped our production on it in 2022. We actually just bottled it and are releasing it this month—we were able to do about 80 cases, which is not very much at all. I think that Roussane is a core wine for us because it is less known and also there are less domestic iterations of it out there. There's a great place in the marketplace for us, and we love to showcase it and love to talk to folks about it, so we're only going to continue to make more of it.
Margot: You mentioned something that I think is super important where you said you basically had to hit the pavement to try and sell these wines. I know several winemakers who have been making wine for a long time are great winemakers, but don't have the experience around actually getting wine to store shelves without having a salesperson on staff. There’s not a lot of best practice material out there.
Vivianne: Oh yeah, it's pretty much a vacuum. It was hard. You have to get used to getting told to come back three times and recognizing that it may or may not result in sales. Portland specifically is a really funny market because there are some incredibly lovely buyers here who are wanting to work with producers like me and who are wanting to showcase natural wines, and those can be some really incredible interactions. There are other places where their entire attitude is why should we even consider tasting any of these wines in this crowded marketplace? You have some pretty gruff folks out there. Developing a thick skin and realizing that it just takes an endless number of repeat trips.
I can think of a relationship with a natural grocer here that literally saved our butts through the pandemic because the wine shops that we work with were not open for the majority of 2020. Those placements on those shelves—New Seasons literally saved our business. But in that case, it took three rounds of pitching the wines to them before finally they said okay you're making enough and you've jumped through the hoops enough times. We will initiate a distribution relationship with you. It is a ton of work to self distribute.
I fell in love with wine, I didn't necessarily fall in love with, or even think about everything that's going to go into selling. You have to wear a lot of hats. I have become very adept at driving giant trucks. It is not what I set out to do, but it is just one of those many hats of small producers that we have to wear. I think that for self-distributing, there are always gonna be difficult interactions and spaces where it just may not be a personality fit for the relationship between the winemaker and the winery and the space. But that doesn't mean that the next great partnership isn't down the road.
I always try to look at those things through the lens of, this account or this area not wanting to work with the wines just frees me up to go ahead and knock on the next door. It might be the next door, the next door, the next door after that. But I am continuously surprised. It can be discouraging being out there pouring the wines and having folks just say nope. But when I have those interactions with really incredible folks who are approaching wine from a similar mindset, who are trying to showcase producers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives and specifically focusing on natural wine in those conversations, those always help to buoy my spirits and help me get through to the next interaction.
I am actually moving over to working with Roan Street Distribution for Oregon. Greg at Hooray For You Wine Company distributes some other queer producers across Oregon as well. I'm switching over to that distribution on April 1st, and I am so incredibly happy about the amount of time that I'll get back to focus on wine. The relationships with my industry partners where I'm not driving around checking shelves, doing delivery fulfillment—doing the math on that, that's 30 more hours a week, every week that I will be able to focus on cellar work and the administrative work that I have been doing on the margins. That will hopefully help me to continue to lead our project for growth.
One of the things that made me delay making that decision for a long time is I have some incredible relationships with folks who I have been selling wine to for years. Just because I'm working with a distributor doesn't mean that I can't drop in and showcase those wines and also have those conversations with the friends I’ve made over the years.
Margot: I love that you get a lot of that time back. That’s really exciting. You're very open about being transgender. You do interviews and social media posts about trans issues and about your own experience. Why is it important to you to be vocal about your experience?
Vivianne: There are a couple of things that go into that. I feel like it's something that is going to end up coming into the conversation at some point regardless. I would rather control the narrative than have that narrative control me. I have nothing to hide. I see the positive impact of those conversations, and it surprises me every time, I continue to have other trans folks who are considering moving forward in the wine industry and who have come across articles and media about myself and the winery, who have reached out to me.
These conversations where someone reaches out and says that coming across my story and the winery story has helped them to realize that they do have a place in the industry and that the knowledge is helpful to them for moving forward for their next steps to proceed into the industry, it’s amazing. It just reminds me that my visibility and the way that I center it actually is helpful to others. I'm not doing it for self gratification. I'm hoping to carve out space and create more space, so down the line, we can have this conversation about this diverse array of transgender professionals in the wine industry across all spectrums of it.
We're out there, but it's so few and far between and how do we find each other, right? It can be difficult to find those connection points. Thinking about a future where there are many of us, that helps me get through the hardest days. There are a lot of things that I would like to be able to change that I cannot, but I hope that my existence fully as myself is a part of building a future where the industry is safer for and has more entry points for other trans folks.
Margot: That work is so important. You raise money and awareness around trans issues through your wines as well. How did you start organizing around that?
Vivianne: In 2018, I came out as myself, a proud transgender woman. At that point I was not actually sure whether or not I was going to continue on in the industry. I wasn't sure whether there was a place for me in the industry. Luckily, I have some friends who sat me down and kindly reminded me that my existence fully as myself and my existence in wine are not mutually exclusive.
I decided that if I was going to move forward and RAM Cellars was going to continue to exist, that we needed to use the platform that we have to do good for communities that we're a part of. That was the genesis our second label, which is dubbed our Viv label. It's the shorthand for my first name, but it's also the French root word that means to live, to be alive. With the extra life that I get, being able to exist fully and vibrantly, it's important to me to use that time to to do good for other queer and trans folks.
That label raises money from every bottle sold for partner non-profit organizations that provide direct support to other queer and trans folks. Our first partner org was Trans Legal Defense and Education Fund in support of their name change project initiative. They offer pro bono legal support and some micro grants for low income trans folks trying to navigate the name change process. It started out with eight major eastern cities and with all of the recent anti-trans legislation, they've also expanded it to some major southern cities as well.
In our successive releases, we partnered with Portland Q Center because we wanted to make sure that we're making a difference in fundraising for other queer and trans folks who are locally in Portland. We also recently started partnering with the Trans Lifeline as well. Historically the first several releases, it was $5 a bottle sold that we were donating to those orgs. We're shifting it to $3 a bottle sold just because with the increase across the board in every one of our supplies, from grapes to bottles to corks to increased rent, rather than making drastic increases on the retail price of those wines, that's one way that we can still try to offer them for as approachable a price as possible.
The Viv label wines are a little bit more expensive than the RAM Cellars label wines just because the donation component is built in so that we're able to still continue to make those and continue to use the platform that we have to raise those funds, which has really been working out. It's between six and ten percent of our yearly sales that ends up getting given back to those orgs. We're a relatively small winery and we make about 1200 cases a year. We're not huge or anything, but we are doing what we can to utilize our platform to give back to folks in our communities.
Margot: That’s so important—I love that you’re committing to giving back through your business, that it’s baked in. Where do you find the joy in what you do every day?
Vivianne: My absolute favorite part of the work is actually having that moment where I'm able to share the wines with folks and have that sort of excited aha moment with folks. Authentically connecting with other human beings over wine is my jam. It helps to remind me why I am doing all of this. Obviously every interaction is not like that, but in those conversations where I'm able to be pouring the wines and talking to folks about them and trying not to get too nerdy and too technical about it, unless somebody wants to go down the rabbit hole and then whoa how much time do you have?
I'm trying to make wine as accessible as possible and remind folks that there is no prerequisite level of knowledge. Removing those layers of pretense to remind folks that wine is a social elixir. When I am trying to create more accessibility to wine from a conceptual standpoint, and as a bonding force, that really is the best of the best for me. I dearly love all things production. I like to be very hands-on—foot crushing, buried in a fermentor, etc. I love all of those things so much, and I find such great joy in it. But it's the social aspect of wine that really helps to continue to stoke that fire for me.
Margot: Thanks so much for taking the time with me. I’m so excited to see RAM Cellars grow and thrive!
You can support Vivianne and RAM Cellars by buying their wines. Purchase a wine from the Viv label to support the non-profits close to Vivianne’s heart. Join the quarterly wine club and follow RAM Cellars on Instagram. If you’re local to Portland, head to an upcoming event.