Our winemaking partnership is built on mutual respect, complementary skills, and a love of great wine.
When Marty Taucher asked Chris Peterson to review his draft winery business plan in 2009, it fortuitously coincided with Peterson’s desire to start a new chapter in his winemaking career. The conversation continued at the friendly confines of North Seattle’s Fiddlers Inn, where the vision for Avennia was born. Mutual esteem for their respective strengths and experiences allowed them to forge an effective partnership. Ultimately, they agreed on Avennia’s core principles – a passionate commitment to signature vineyards and natural processes in the cellar – resulting in timeless, world class wines that are solely and undeniably Washington.
MANAGING DIRECTOR
A native Oregonian, Marty graduated from Oregon State in 1977 and started at a then upstart Microsoft in 1984. He led the Public Relations and Event Marketing teams for a decade, spending his last five years as Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy for a consumer and online product group.
As his work demanded more travel around the globe, his interest in wine and winemaking grew. Now, after almost three decades of collecting wine, he still finds great joy in the adventure of seeking out new vintners and wine styles from all over the world. In 2009, he was brought on as a crush intern at DeLille Cellars where he met Chris Peterson and together they laid the foundation for what is now Avennia.
Always inspired by new ideas and fresh thinking, Marty is an angel investor. He serves on numerous non-profit boards. When he’s not in the cellar, he’s an avid golfer, a world traveler, and a perfectly reliable drummer.
WINEMAKER/PARTNER
An integral part of the Washington wine industry for more than two decades, Chris spent seven years helping make some of the state’s most heralded and award-winning wines at DeLille Cellars. He has traveled to, and immersed himself in, all of the major wine growing regions of France (as well as Tuscany and Sicily) where regional food and wine, vineyards tours and his relationships with other winemakers have inspired and informed his own natural winemaking practices.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Chris graduated from the University of Washington majoring in the Comparative History of Ideas. He went on to become the first graduate of Walla Walla Community College’s Enology and Viticulture program, where he taught classes on wines of the world with the late instructor and industry pioneer Stan Clarke.
Our minimalist approach in the cellar results in wines of elegance, complexity, and balance.
Avennia was founded on the passion to showcase Washington as a unique and compelling place for great wines. Our priority is to acquire fruit from some of the finest vineyards in Washington, and allow them to express themselves. We chose to focus on the grape varieties used in Bordeaux and the Rhône, as their similar latitude to Washington makes them a natural fit to excel here.
Inspired by the naturalist vigneron methods in the Old World, our winemaking is based on doing less in order to let the fruit speak for itself. With this approach, sourcing the finest fruit possible is paramount. We use native yeast to ferment the wines, and bottle them unfined to preserve the most complexity and expression. Blending trials are used extensively to achieve the finest texture and balance possible.
A lot of thought is put into choosing vineyard sites to match our winemaking style and preference. We choose not only the vineyard sources themselves, but down to our favorite vineyard blocks. There is an emphasis on older vines, and moderate climates, as these features tend to create wine with more depth and complexity—a balance between fruit and non-fruit characteristics. We sample the grapes frequently as harvest approaches, tasting the fruit to find the ideal day to harvest. Our picking philosophy is simple: pick the fruit when it is barely, yet definitively, ripe.
Our natural-leaning hand during harvest and fermentation results in many unique blocks of wine in the cellar. The next question is: where do they go? For us, the next critical step is finding the blends. Our approach to blending is extensive and purposeful. This means blending different varieties together, of course, but it can also mean blending wines of the same variety from different blocks; wines in new oak with wines in older oak; large barrels with small barrels, or wine aged in concrete. When tasting through blends, the emphasis is on finding balance, structure, and teasing out that inimitable character that makes a wine recognizable related to past vintages, while also being unique.
We believe that the highest compliment in a wine is to be balanced and harmonious. We strive for the main elements—the bones of the wine—to be in harmony: fruit, acid, tannin, perhaps oak. The wine moves seamlessly from the front of the palate to the finish, without any of these aspects dominating the others. This is a key tenet of Old World winemaking, and perhaps the one we take most to heart. When you open your next bottle of Sestina, or Arnaut, or any Avennia wine, we hope you taste the care and attention we put into each bottle.
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