Left to right: Trey Busch (owner), Jerry Solomon (owner), and Keith Johnson (production winemaker), Sleight of Hand Cellars.

Location will be the winery’s third

Sleight of Hand Cellars, a Walla Walla Valley-based winery, will open a tasting room in Woodinville, Washington. The new space is slated to open in early December.

“It’s a great location, and there’s a good synergy with the wineries that are already there,” says Trey Busch, co-owner, president, and director of winemaking.

The tasting room will be located in the Hollywood Schoolhouse area, in part of the space that was previously occupied by Long Shadows. The other part of that space will be a new tasting room for Darby.

Sleight of Hand’s new Woodinville tasting room will have 1,000 square feet of interior space. It will be able to accommodate approximately 25 people inside and an additional 10 outside.

The winery already has a tasting room at its production facility in Walla Walla and in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood. Busch says the new space will have a similar feel to those locations.

“It’s going to be a smaller version of what we have in Walla Walla and what we have in SoDo,” Busch says. “There will be lots of music posters. We’ll have vinyl on the turntable all the time.”

Busch says the winery, which he co-owns with Jerry and Sandy Solomon, had been looking for a location for an additional tasting room for several years. Spokane, Vancouver, Bend, and Boise were all considered.

“Woodinville was at the top of our list though,” Busch says. “We know that there are a lot of customers that we’re currently missing that are going through there, so we want to go out and get them.”

Woodinville is already home to 120+ wineries and tasting rooms. Chateau Ste. Michelle, Washington’s largest winery, is located there and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors per year. While new tasting rooms constantly open in the area, Sleight of Hand will have a leg up as a well-established brand. The winery was founded in 2007.

Sleight of Hand will continue to operate its SoDo tasting room. That location opened in August of 2016 and has been used for music events as well as tastings.

“The SoDo space is going to continue to be our fun party space for us to have live shows,” says Busch, an unabashed audiophile. “We’ve also built up a huge customer base from West Seattle, Burien, and Tacoma – folks that don’t necessarily go up to Woodinville but who love wine.”

Sleight of Hand opening a third tasting room is part of a trend in Washington. Numerous wineries have opened multiple satellite tastings rooms across the state and beyond since laws changed in 2018 allowing wineries to have up to five satellite tasting rooms. Previously, wineries had been restricted to three. For all of the wineries taking this approach, the goal is the same.

“We’re trying to capture as much direct-to-consumer business as we can,” Busch says.

Washington wineries have also been focusing on opening satellite tasting rooms due to distributor and retailer consolidation. This has made an already challenging national marketplace all the more difficult.

Long Shadows, meanwhile, moved to a newly constructed group of buildings on the old Red Hook brewery campus. Mark Ryan and Fidélitas are also located there. The new Mark Ryan tasting room opened last weekend. DeLille and Sparkman previously opened on the same campus in 2019 and 2020 respectively in the former brewery buildings after extensive renovations.

Sleight of Hand Cellars makes approximately 9,000 cases of wine annually.

Image courtesy of Sleight of Hand Cellars.

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