It’s evident that this is a working winery. You might find piles of boxes of wines returning home from being packed. They’re just finishing bottling the 2010 harvest. You might find yourself facing piles of palettes. Come during harvest season, and you might encounter a borderline intimidating number of grapes.

If you see a purposeful blur hurtling past, then you’ve come close to meeting Nicholson. He’s busy with the wine, but the bridge between wines and wine-drinkers is Sandra Nicholson or a member of her team.

Nicholas is the tasting room manager (That’s her official title anyway; less formally, she says, she is the “What Needs to Be Done Girl”). She keeps her small crew ready to talk about wines with anybody from a 21-year-old buying that precious first legal bottle to a collector with climate-controlled storage and years of experience and knowledge.

Sandra Nicholson is infectiously in love with Red Hook Winery, its products and its environment: “Ridiculously awesome equipment, and the barrels and the rusticness of it all, and then the magic of the location – and it all comes together, and I feel like it shows in the wine.”

4/7