Bainbridge Vineyards

The winery puts “tasting room” in quotation marks on its own page. At the end of a long driveway off NE Day Road, five miles from the ferry on the north side of Bainbridge Island, Bainbridge Vineyards pours its wine in an outdoor garden set among its vines and the neighboring farms. There are patio tables with umbrellas, covered spaces with heaters, and an open meadow with picnic tables and room for blankets. In summer the garden fills with flowers. In winter it is lit with strings of small lights. Children are sent to the meadow to visit the horses. Seating goes to whoever arrives first.

The horses work. The vines are cultivated by draft horse, and the winery credits Betsey Wittick, its grape grower, winemaker and head owner, with pioneering the use of draft horses for farming in Washington State. The grapes grow on 15 acres inside a 40-acre historic farm. They are certified organic and pressed on the place, and the winery says it is the only one on the island that grows every grape it uses. The varieties are cool-climate vinifera, which the winery compares to those of northern France, southern Germany, Hungary and Austria: Madeleine Angevine, Müller-Thurgau, Siegerrebe, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir. A 2015 list in West Sound Magazine also included a Ferryboat White blended from the four whites, a late-harvest Siegerrebe made in the style of Sauternes, and a raspberry wine with more than a pound of island berries in each bottle. Cheese, crackers, salami, smoked salmon, nuts and chocolate are sold at the garden, and the winery encourages picnics.

Visitors stay in the garden. It sits on 40 acres of shared working farmland, part private and part public, and because the land is in mixed use the vineyards are not open for exploration. Wittick leads vineyard tours by appointment and on event days.

Sundays, pizza and Weinfest

On Sundays in September and October, the One Two Kai truck parks at the garden from 1 to 6 p.m. Chef Kaafi and his crew serve wood-fired pizza on sourdough crust, with Bainbridge-inspired toppings as well as margherita and pepperoni. Music follows in mid-afternoon. The 2026 calendar included John Willett and Molo Band, who have played jazz, blues, country and rock across Western and Eastern Washington for decades. The local duo Songbird also played, along with Tide Flat 4, a band of Indianola neighbors formed during the Covid years on guitar, bass, violin and mandolin. Thursday evening concerts ran through the summer and ended on September 10, 2026, with the singer and guitarist Mark Soltys. On Fridays every glass pour is $2 off all day. On the first Friday of each month the garden holds an open-table book club, and on other Fridays people bring knitting or other craft projects to the tables.

The 2nd Annual Weinfest was set for Saturday, October 17, 2026. The winery calls it its “wine version of Oktoberfest,” a celebration of its German varieties. The Bear and The Banjo were booked to play accordion and banjo. Kristin of Fantail Farm planned to bring mini cheesecakes in seasonal flavors, pumpkin among them. A self-guided walk through the garden vineyard passes new informational signs, and visitors taste grapes and juice straight from the vines. The Suyematsu Farm pumpkin patch is a short walk down the road.

A farm in a boy’s name

The pumpkin patch belongs to the older farm. Yasuji and Mitsuo Suyematsu, immigrants from Japan, farmed rented land nearby for more than a decade before they bought these 40 acres in 1928. Under the Asian Exclusion Act they could not own land, so they registered it in the name of their eldest son, Akio. EduCulture, a local farm education group, says he was 8 at the time. Great Northwest Wine says 7. The barn went up in 1928 on embedded treated poles under rafters of four-inch logs. The house followed in 1929. Mostly by hand and horse, the family spent three decades clearing forest into berry fields. In the 1930s and 1940s, island farmers like them made Bainbridge the strawberry capital of the Pacific Northwest, known for the Marshall variety.

In March 1942 the family was forced off the land just before harvest, when the fields held what would have been one of the largest crops they had ever seen. Great Northwest Wine gives the day as March 30. Soldiers with rifles and bayonets put the island’s residents of Japanese descent on a boat to Seattle, marched them from Colman Dock to the King Street train station, and sent them to Manzanar. They were the first Japanese Americans interned in the country. EduCulture names both Manzanar and Minidoka as the Suyematsus’ camps. The family could not afford a farm manager, and the land went untended through the war. In 1944 Akio and his brother Ish were drafted from camp, and according to Great Northwest Wine, Akio served in Germany as a military policeman. The family came back between 1945 and 1947. EduCulture says they were among only a quarter of the original strawberry farmers to reclaim their land.

Akio farmed on. In the 1950s the family built bunkhouses and outhouses for migrant pickers, and in 1958 he was named Kitsap Farmer of the Year. In the 1980s, EduCulture records, his farm started the first formal composting operation on Bainbridge and became the first farm on the island to go organic.

The Bentryns’ cool-climate bet

Gerard and Jo Ann Bentryn studied viticulture and winemaking in Europe, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and came away partial to the aromatic wines of the Loire and the Mosel. In 1977 they founded Bainbridge Island Vineyards and Winery. Great Northwest Wine says maybe a dozen wineries were then operating in Washington. The Bentryns did not want grapes from the warm Columbia Valley, and they began with a one-acre vineyard in downtown Winslow.

The accounts of their move to Day Road differ in their details. The city’s 2016 historic register nomination says they leased the western part of the Suyematsu farm in the late 1970s and expanded a vineyard Akio had planted there, and later bought half the property and built a house and winery. The winery’s own history dates the Day Road purchase to 1982. That was also the year of the Bentryns’ first estate-grown vintage, which made them the 84th bonded winery in Washington, and they planted eight acres on the farm. Great Northwest Wine reports that they were purportedly among the first to plant Siegerrebe and make wine from it, and that they bought Akio’s fruit for strawberry and raspberry wines.

The red came later. According to West Sound Magazine, Wittick suggested in the mid-1980s that the winery needed a red. The Bentryns went to Oregon producers, and Barney Watson of Tyee Winery in the Willamette Valley, then a professor, helped her start Pinot Noir on the island. The vines went in during the late ‘80s, and the first commercial harvest, a small one, came in 1992. Wittick holds a bachelor’s degree in plant science from Rutgers and a master’s in horticulture from Cornell. She began growing grapes and making wine with the Bentryns in 1989, and the magazine says she did most of the winemaking behind Gerard for 18 years. In 1995 Gerard was instrumental in the certification of the Puget Sound American Viticultural Area.

Four years of tending idle vines

The Bentryns retired in 2009. Great Northwest Wine reports that their employees bought the winery. West Sound Magazine says the winery closed from 2009 to 2013, and that Wittick and a group of volunteers kept the vineyards going through those years. “The grapes were in such good shape that we wanted them to stay,” Wittick told the magazine.

The winery reopened in December 2013 under the shorter name Bainbridge Vineyards. A group of young people who had interned on other local farms approached Wittick, and she gathered them with friends and community members into Bainbridge Winery LLC. In 2015 the magazine reported that the business was not legally a cooperative but was run like one, mostly by women working in teams, with one team running the tasting room. The new labels carried photographs by the local photographer Joel Sackett. Robin Bodong, who grew up on the island, took over as vineyard manager. “I don’t think this would have gone on if someone like Robin had not been a part of this,” Wittick said, “because she is part of that new energy, that new blood that is really critical for the system.” The vineyard received organic certification in September 2014, after more than ten years of organic growing. Wittick still runs a summer internship program, and on part of the Suyematsu land she farms Laughing Crow Farm, which the city credits with excellent garlic, potatoes, cabbages and peppers.

The rest of the farm has passed into public hands. In 2001 Akio sold his remaining fifteen acres to the City of Bainbridge Island, and ownership transferred when he died. In 2004 the city bought about ten acres of the Bentryn property. Akio worked the land until he died on July 31, 2012, at the age of 90, and the city proclaimed August 19 Akio Suyematsu Day. In 2016 five acres around the original barn and house became the island’s first Historic Preservation District. Karen Selvar, who began working for Akio when she was 9, now grows strawberries, raspberries, pumpkins and dahlias there. Mike Lempriere, who leases part of the old farm for his own vines, has explained what the city’s ownership means. “It has been stripped of development rights,” he told Great Northwest Wine. “It can never be used for anything except farming.”