Kevin Corliss, vice president of grape resources at Ste. Michelle Wine Estates (SMWE), retired at the end of October. Corliss was responsible for managing all Ste. Michelle-owned and leased vineyards as well as grower relations in Washington and, up until recently, Oregon, with a dotted line to SMWE’s holdings in California. Corliss worked at SMWE for more than 38 years.

“I look back at my career, and I feel very, very blessed to be able to be one of the people on the ground floor,” Corliss says. “I had the opportunity to work with a lot of amazing people.”

Born to be a fieldman

Corliss was born in Prosser Hospital in the heart of Washington wine country. He was raised in nearby Grandview.

Corliss’s father was a fieldman for Smucker’s and a Welch grape grower. The family had a concord grape vineyard.

“I grew up driving a tractor, bending anchors, and doing all the things that you would do to take care of a vineyard,” Corliss says.

Corliss’s father made home wine. Corliss even made some himself as a teenager. “I got an interest in it early,” he says of the wine industry.

He expressed that interest early too. When his high school guidance counselor asked him what he wanted to do when he graduated, Corliss gave two possibilities.

“I said I want to fly jets off aircraft carriers, or I want to be a grape fieldman,” Corliss says. When a knee injury took flying jets off the table, he pursued a career in grape growing.

Corliss’s interest in viticulture was more than just a passion for wine. “I really liked being outside,” he says. “I didn’t have to dress up. I could wear boots and grow my hair long.”

“My classmates thought I was crazy”

Corliss attended Washington State University (WSU), earning a degree in horticulture. In his class of approximately 50 people, he was the only person interested in grape growing.

“My classmates thought I was crazy,” Corliss says. “There was no money in grapes. Tree fruit was king.”

In 1983, when he was still in college, Corliss did an internship at Ste. Michelle. He counted bugs for the company. Corliss would drive back and forth from Pullman to home most weekends to take care of the family’s vineyard.

When he graduated from WSU in 1986, Ste. Michelle offered Corliss a position as a research viticulturalist. About a year and a half later, Corliss moved over to the pest management group, which focused on Ste. Michelle-owned vineyards. When his boss left, Corliss was asked if he would head up the group.

“I’m just really fresh out of out of college,” Corliss says. “I’m more bold than I probably should have been, and I said, ‘Sure. I can do that.’”

Come the ‘90s, the pest management group morphed into the viticulture group. Corliss did viticultural work as well as grower relations.

“When I first started with the company, there was really only one person that worked with the growers,” Corliss says. “Over time, we started to become very culturally involved, not just contractually involved, with growers.”

Hitting the launch button

While Corliss was at the winery, Ste. Michelle established a number of partnerships. The first, named Col Solare, was with Italy’s Antinori family and started in 1995. The second was the Eroica project in 1999 with Germany’s Dr. Loosen.

“That really hit the launch button on my career,” Corliss says. “It changed the way that I grew and looked at Riesling, for example, to the tune of millions of dollars worth of production decisions based on tromping around vineyards in Washington and in Europe with Ernie Loosen and tasting wine.”

During his time at SMWE, which was called Stimson Lane previously, Corliss was involved in planting a large amount of acreage. SMWE contracts with vineyards across the Columbia Valley. The winery established its own Canoe Ridge Estate vineyard in 1991, with the ‘90s a time of growth in plantings.

“That was the first serious surge, where people realized that they could make money at [grape growing],” Corliss says. Corliss played a lead role in establishing the Horse Heaven Hills as a federally approved growing region in 2005.

Creating something you can see from space

Over his four decades in the industry, Corliss found establishing vineyards particularly satisfying. “It’s really fun to take a piece of ground and make something on it that you can see from space,” Corliss says. “It also has great economic and artistic value.”

In the ‘90s and aughts, the Washington wine industry grew by leaps and bounds. However, Corliss says it was not all fun. There were plenty of challenges, from frosts and freezes to industry undulations. As always, grape growing is not for the faint of heart.

“There were cycles where it was more terrifying and less exciting,” Corliss says. “And sometimes it was more exciting than a little terrifying.”

One of the challenges was a severe shortage of trained people. “When I was starting my career, you literally had to train everyone on everything because you really couldn’t attract a viticulturist out of California, at least not for very long,” Corliss says. “Coming to Washington from [University of California] Davis was like going to Mars.”

That too would change. In 2016, WSU, Corliss’s alma mater, established the Wine Science Center that bears Ste. Michelle’s name. Today, WSU and other colleges around the state supply an abundance of growers, winemakers, and other workers to the industry.

“A walking encyclopedia”

During his time in industry, Corliss has been an active member of Washington Winegrowers, the Washington Wine Advisory Committee, the Center of Sustainable Agriculture, and the College of Agriculture for Washington State University. He has been intimately involved with the development of Vinewise, an online guide for Washington grape growers and vintners to assess their viticultural practices against industry standards for sustainability.

“Kevin is just a teacher,” says Katie Nelson, vice president of winemaking at Chateau Ste. Michelle. Nelson started working with Corliss in 1999.

“He’s like a walking encyclopedia,” she says. “He really understands the history of Washington and the history of the wine industry, but I think what makes him really unique is he’s open to change. He’d change what we did internally, which also had a huge influence on Ste. Michelle growers and the Washington wine industry.”

There’s another aspect of Corliss that had a profound impact. “He loves wine so much,” Nelson says. “So he’s not just growing grapes. He’s actually making wines in the vineyard and different styles through what he did.”

An industry changed

As Corliss steps away from SMWE, he leaves an industry profoundly changed and one that bears his fingerprints. When Corliss first started counting bugs for Ste. Michelle, Washington was producing just over 21,000 tons of wine grapes per year. In 2016, at the height of the state’s production, Washington produced 270,000 tons. Corliss influenced a great deal of that.

In recent years, the Washington and global wine industry have been facing headwinds. Corliss, however, still sees plenty of reason for optimism in Washington wine.

“At the end of the day, we don’t have the heat to compete in a volume market,” Corliss says. “We have to complete in a quality market, and we can.”

Corliss intends to spend his retirement flying his airplane, driving his boat, and visiting his grandson. Corliss also plans to keep his hands on grape vines. He will work with a small group of clients to assist with grape growing and to share his knowledge.

“I’d like to keep doing this viticulture thing,” Corliss says.

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