Rand Sealey, founder of Washington’s oldest independent wine store and later author of a local wine review newsletter, passed away October 17th in Walla Walla. He was 79 years old.
Sealey founded Esquin Wine Merchants in Seattle in 1969. Over the 28 years he owned the company, Esquin had a profound impact on the Seattle area wine scene.
“His store was exceedingly important,” says Jay Soloff, who co-founded Woodinville’s DeLille Cellars in 1992 and worked in the restaurant industry and as a wine broker in Esquin’s early decades. “Stores like Esquin were equally important to any restaurant as far as the exposure that they were giving all of the brands they had.”
A little over a decade after selling Esquin, Sealey founded Rand Sealey’s Review of Washington Wines, a wine review site. At Esquin and on his own site, Sealey’s wine descriptions have been among the most poetic in the local industry. Sealey continued writing and reviewing until the end of his life.
John Randolph Sealey was born December 13, 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri. He was the child of John Leon Sealey and Jane Sealey.
Sealey lived most of his life in the Seattle area. He attended Lakeside School. Sealey went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in New York City in 1966. He subsequently earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1969.
That same year, Sealey founded Esquin Wine Merchants, at the time on 1st Avenue in Seattle. This was early days for the Seattle area wine scene and equally early for the Washington wine industry. Ste Michelle Vineyards (now Chateau Ste. Michelle), Washington’s founding winery, made its first wine only two years prior.
Over the next several decades, the Northwest wine industry grew slowly. During this time, Esquin largely focused on imports and other domestic wine. This, however, says more about the state of the industry at that point than anything about Sealey specifically.
“Rand did buy, but only if he really, really, really liked the wine,” says Soloff of his experiences selling the DeLille wines. “He didn’t do it because it was Washington and he was promoting Washington. He did it because he liked the wine, and he could stand behind it.”
Sealey married Lynn Morgan Beaty (now Lynn Beaty Sealey) in 1974 in Aspen, Colorado. The couple remained married throughout Sealey’s life.
In 1997, Sealey sold Esquin to Chuck LeFevre. (LeFevre and his family sold Esquin to Downtown Spirits earlier this year.) Sealey continued to consult for the company for a period.
Esquin Wine & Spirits (renamed after spirits privatization in 2011) remains one of the most important wine retailers in Washington. It has been a critical outlet for wine lovers and also the state’s wine industry, which has grown exponentially over the last 26 years. Many, including myself, have had formative wine experiences at Esquin and from wines purchased there.
In 2008, Sealey started Rand Sealey’s Review of Washington Wines. The on-line site published a monthly newsletter of reviews of local wines using the 20-point scale. Sealey also wrote regular blog articles, the last of which was published earlier this month.
In the late aughts, the Sealeys moved to Walla Walla. The move put the couple in the heart of wine country, with the valley currently home to more than 120 wineries and tasting rooms. They embraced the community as much as it embraced them.
Sealey regularly visited local wineries and would write about them in his newsletter. If there was an important wine event, Sealey and his wife were there. He was widely known and universally liked.
“He was such a consistent, kind, thoughtful supporter of people in the wine industry,” says Erik McLaughlin, CEO at Metis, a Walla Walla-based mergers and acquisitions firm. “He also had a real talent for finding the gems in the rough and being able to find greatness in places other people didn’t necessarily expect.”
Sealey was also a regular participant of a prominent Walla Walla tasting group. He shared his insights with those who took the time to listen.
“He always was so soft spoken but often had the most thoughtful things to say,” McLaughlin says.
Sealey remained active in the industry until the very end of his life. He was scheduled to give the introduction at the inaugural Grenache Festival occurring in Walla Walla at the beginning of next month on Fall Release weekend.
“Rand’s writing was always so thoughtful and descriptive, and he really made the wines in his reviews sound delicious,” says Carrie Alexander, one of the founders of the festival and owner of Atelier Freewater. “But besides that, he was just a wonderful person.”
NB: This post has been updated to correctly list Rand Sealey’s age as 79.
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Rand was always a supporter of the Lake Chelan AVA and would visit here regularly with his wife Lynn to taste through our current vintages. I am so sorry to hear that he has passed, we have lost a friend and wonderful advocate of Washington wines. He loved our wines and we always felt honored to receive his reviews and visits. My condolences to his family, he will be missed.
This is very sad news. I have been a subscriber to Rand’s newsletter for many years. I was always amazed at how descriptive his tasting notes were. RIP.
I was a customer Of Sealey’s when his shop was on First Avenue in that old brick building. All the wines were in stacks all over the old cracked concrete floor. There was barely room to navigate through all those stacks. In fact my wife once accidentally knocked a bottle to the floor and it broke. Rand told us not to bother worrying about it, though we offered to pay. He was quite the character and so knowledgeable; so soft spoken that I was never quite sure what was going on in his head. His shop and Pike & Western Wine shop in Pike Place Market were my first experiences in small wine retail after I moved to Seattle in 1974. The local industry owes a great deal to Mr. Sealey. Am assuming he wouldn’t have celebrated his 80th birthday until December. So close. My condolences to his family.
Thank you sharing this remembrance and also for the catch on Rand’s age. I have made this correction.
Rand will be missed very much for his kindness, intelligence and palate. He was a true professional, a great writer and a lovely man.
Proud, that wines I was in charge of, were in the Esquin inventory.
I’m so sorry to hear of Rand’s passing, but I’m glad to hear it was sudden and he had more work planned in the near term. We should be so lucky to love life and wine to the end. I really appreciated Rand’s reviews and his insights into our wines and those of others in the state. He saw things we didn’t or approved of the delicate parts we wished would have been more intense. He just loved wine as a lot of us in this industry do. I enjoyed his attention to our releases and his thoughtfulness about our latest releases. He’d write and say we needed to send wine as he wanted to review them soon. Many thanks to Rand for his friendship and his major contribution to Washington State wines.
Rand and Lynn were special friends for the last 50+ years and I was a early customer at Esquin. He will be missed and my sorrow to Lynn. They did have a special life together.