Red Sky Winery

Great wines and a feel good little (boutique) winery. I love the fact that it’s owned by a woman who is also the creative wine maker! I love their reds; I took a bottle of their seductive Serendipity to Europe this past Christmas, and it was the start of the evening. Look forward to their upcoming releases.

Another rainy Sunday in Seattle (don’t be shocked) so time again to make the schlep to Woodinville. It wasn’t any sunnier in this little corner of King County than in the big city, so when we saw a winery named Red Sky we made a bee line, happy for any reference to the heavens without the word «gray» in it. We were greeted at the door by a good omen in the form of a sweet, sweet winery dog named MIa, and our good fortune was confirmed when we started drinking their wines.
We were additionally fortunate to have our wine poured for us by Carol, the winemaker, and she clued us in to the backstories for each of the wines and to the inspiration for all of the wines they make: Bordeaux. Accordingly, the tasting started with a dry Semillon blended with some Sauv Blanc. This wine had lots of character and complexity and feels like it would be a great seafood and charcuterie wine. Carol followed the Semillon up with a rosé that was driven by Cab Franc; dark and flavorful, this is another good food wine. Completing the Bordeaux trifecta, we got a pour of a Cab Franc that was smooth and that didn’t have any of the vegetal flavors you sometimes get in poorly made CF. We were also offered a pour of an ’05 Bordeaux blend that was drinking very elegantly. Finally, we got to try their newly released late-​harvest Semillon, and this was really something. Profoundly sweet but well-​balanced this wine smelled and tasted of caramel, spun sugar and dried tropical fruit.
Bottom line: Several wineries in Woodinville make wine of this caliber and several focus on Bordeaux, but Red Sky takes it to the next level by making the entire spectrum of wine (white, rosé, red and dessert) in the Bordeaux style. So, the next time you’re looking for a slice of southern France on a gloomy Washington afternoon, you know where to head.

Enjoyed a nice tasting here while in Woodinville Warehouse District. The tasting room is very small and doesn’t really offer any seating. I liked the fact that you could pick four wines off of the list to taste and were not just stuck with the ones they were pouring.
Our group enjoyed almost all of the wines, with the exception of the merlot, which none of us really liked. Picked up a couple of bottles (sunrise and sunshine) at an affordable price!
Not to die for, not horrible, just a-​ok wines and a very friendly staff!

One of my favorite wineries! Woman owned, super friendly, and of course, great wine!

I LOVE Red Sky’s wines. My husband and I finally joined their wine club this year, after years of enjoying our friends’ club bottles and our occasional purchases. The semillon, sunrise, bordeaux, merlot, serendipity… I’ve loved pretty much every bottle I’ve ever had. I’d drink it all the time, if I could justify $ 25-​$ 40 bucks on a weeknight bottle. Maybe in those wild and careless days, pre mortgage, child… responsibility… but this is all relative. I look forward to the $ 30 weeknight wine budget.
We find that these wines are best shared with good friends.

I’d agree with the other three star reviews in general. While the tasting room is small and nice, and the staff is quite friendly though sometimes uninformed, the wine is not up to par.
We’ve tasted there a number of times, and while each time I went I did find something that was, well… I guess I’d say OK, nothing stood out at all. I’ll still try again but will hope that with time the wine will improve. If you’re going to compete with the other wineries in the WH district, you gotta produce something thats better than the average.
Tasting room, as I said, is nice, and the staff is friendly. Price points are a bit high since the quality lacks.

By far and away one of the best kept secrets in the Woodinville Warehouse District, and WA for that matter. Exceptional wines, priced appropriately for the quality. I’m particularly fond of their Bordeaux style blends which I have been purchasing for the past 5 years. I never am disappointed by their friendly staff — 100% of them volunteers mind you! The owners work very hard to make excellent wine for themselves… I’m glad they sell some too! And, I should say «congrats to them» on their latest Wine Advocate scores…92 and 90 pts for their Cab Sauv and Cab Franc! Yum! Their new tasting room is beautiful and show-​cases some excellent local artists to boot. Can’t wait to visit them again.

I’ve been to this place many times, my best friend really loves this place and always wants to come back when she visits me. The thing is, every time I go here, I just don’t care for the wine. It’s just ok, it’s missing something. I really want to like it, I really want to support them. But every time I walk away wishing that there was something worthwhile to buy. I love buying wine, but I only buy good wine that I enjoy. I have yet to be wowed by this place… but it’s so close I can feel it… and so I keep coming back hoping that they’ve finally gotten it right. I still have hope, but the boyfriend is slowly giving up on them and our last warehouse winery tour he said «let’s just skip it, we’ve never liked anything there» which kind of broke my heart because I want them to do well.
The reason I want them to do so well is because the owners are so nice and seem like really good people… but alas, that’s not enough for me to shell out $ 30 for a bottle of just ok wine.

This is complicated for me because — with certain exceptions — I don’t enjoy dumping on our local wineries. If they’re fatuous boobs, yeah, I’ll take a shot. Unfortunately, the Unilocal star-​system buttons only give you the «meh» for 2-​stars and the «A-​OK» for 3. Red Sky, to be completely accurate, falls somewhere in between those two terms. But the folks who run Red Sky are earnest and hard-​working and WANT, desperately, to make good wines. And, they partially succeed. But they also do and think some astoundingly ill-​advised things and that’s why I gave them this lukewarm rating.
My GF and I attended a charity benefit tasting for Gilda’s Club, a cause near and dear to our hearts. At that tasting, Red Sky had a table with two volunteers pouring. We came to their table and held out our glasses. The two ladies were chatting and barely acknowledged us. One murmured, «We’ll start with the Merlot.» She poured it for us and we raised the glasses to our noses and both stopped dead. It was corked; that condition of bacterial taint that makes wine smell and taste like your Grandma’s mildewy attic. It’s unmistakable. We owned a wine shop, at the time, and we smelled wines like this regularly. There was NO doubt. My GF passed the glass back to the woman and said, «This is corked.» The women kinda rolled her eyes, smelled it and smirked, «No, it’s fine. That’s the way it’s supposed to taste.» We were ASTOUNDED. The bottle was three-​quarters empty. They had poured this tainted wine for maybe 18 – 20 people. It smelled vile and people went away thinking this was how their wines are supposed to smell and taste. And this woman saw nothing wrong AT ALL. I called the winery the next day and told them about it and they said their volunteer had told them about the incident and they felt it was probably okay!
Later, the lady who owns the winery came in my shop with samples. I tasted them and the Merlot was fresh and tasted just fine. She left and I promised to consider the wines. Three days later, she called to ask what I thought. I told her that I thought their one white was very good and that I would buy some but told her that their reds were not what I was looking for. I said that the Merlot was the best I tasted from them but explained that I couldn’t justify charging what I would have to to carry it — $ 28 — because I had several Merlots at lower price points that I felt were better. She asked which these were and I named a Californian, an Aussie, and two from Chile. She asked which sold best and I replied that the one Chilean did; ten bucks, great varietal character, and good supply. «Well,» she chuckled, «That’s great but, of course, their and ours are not the same product.»
«Whoa,» I said, «’ Not the same product’? How do you get that?»
She went on to tell me that a Washington Merlot was inherently a superior wine to a Chilean. I replied that my customers don’t care about that reasoning. They want the best-​tasting wine for the least money.
This argument went on, via email, for about a week.
If Red Sky’s wines had been solidly good, even by our local standards, I would have bought them and advocated for them. I LOVE supporting local businesses. But the proof of the wine is in your mouth and Red Sky’s wines were unbalanced, needlessly tannic, showed strong suggestions of being manipulated a LOT in the winery, and simply NOT as good as the rather lofty quality standard of about 85% of the other Woodinville wineries. I recently retasted their wines and found the same thing in this vintage.
I respect and admire anyone who lays their fanny out there and starts a new business, especially one as dicey as new winery. But you MUST deliver where it counts: in your product. It doesn’t matter if you’re making widgets, burgers, floral arrangements, or wine. If your stuff isn’t great, YOU aren’t great. The reasoning behind Red Sky is simply wrong: NO region’s wines are any better than what’s coming out of the bottle. If it says «Cabernet» on your bottle, you are, like it or not, competing with EVERY other bottle of Cabernet in the world. Just being «local» isn’t enough. You have to be GOOD and Red Sky just flat needs to make BETTER WINE.