Camas Prairie Winery

The Camas Prairie Winery occupies a renovated 1914 storefront at 207 Main Street in Bovill, on the eastern edge of Latah County. The town sits in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains where Highway 3 meets Highway 8. The winery places itself on the scenic Whitepine Highway, and Great Northwest Wine calls Bovill a St. Joe National Forest town. A 2026 University of Idaho account gives the town an elevation of 2,874 feet and a population of 191 by the 2020 census. The same account says Bovill is perhaps best known as the place locals pass through on their way to Elk River, on snowmobiles in winter and four-wheelers in summer. In the same town stand the Bovill Opera House, with interior murals by “Cowboy” Joe Breckenridge, and the Hotel Bovill. Both are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Meads at the tasting bar

The tasting room pours wine by the glass and sells flights the visitor puts together: any three wines for $1, any six for $2. Visit North Central Idaho also lists tours, a wine bar and imported beer. Everything is made on the premises. The winery calls itself a production winery making about 20 wines. The American Winery Guide puts its output near 2,000 cases a year and counts more than 50 medals and awards.

The meads lead the list. Raspberry, Strawberry, Blackberry and Huckleberry are each honey fermented with its berry. Palouse Gold is made of honey alone. The Huckleberry Mead is the best seller, made from whole huckleberries and honey. The winery suggests serving it chilled beside dark chocolate or a sharp cheese, or drizzled on vanilla bean ice cream. Palouse Gold is built crisp and light, and the winery pairs it with New York style cheesecake and also with grilled halibut in a creamy dill sauce.

Great Northwest Wine wrote that the 2018 Huckleberry Mead “pours into the glass a pink-hued-amber.” It described the 2019 Raspberry Mead as having “a big nose of hard raspberry candy and chewy honey.” That raspberry mead took gold at the 2020 Idaho Wine Competition in August. In October it took gold again and was named Best Sweet Wine at the 2020 Great Northwest Invitational Wine Competition, judged at the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, Oregon.

The rest of the list includes these wines:

• a Wild Plum made from yellow plums grown in Kendrick, Idaho
• a Late Harvest Orange Muscat from the Lady Hawk planting at Champoux Vineyard in Washington’s Horse Heaven Hills
• a Riesling in the German Piesporter style
• a Merlot aged eight months in oak
• a Cabernet Sauvignon

For winter there is a Spiced Wine, a blend of cherry and grape wines with spices, sold ready to heat. The winery modeled it on the Christmas wines of Scandinavia, England and Germany. The Vandal Crest series carries University of Idaho images on its labels, and a percentage of its sales goes to student scholarships.

A garage, a storefront, and a sale

The winery dates to 1983 and to Stuart Scott. Before he went commercial, Scott owned a two-acre vineyard and made wine as a hobby. According to the Lewiston Tribune, he had already retired from the U.S. Army and from the U.S. Justice Department, where he was a probation and parole agent for the northern Idaho federal courts. He started the business in his garage on $18,000. By his own account he won a commercial award in his rookie year as a winemaker. A federal list of wine producers from November 2008 carries the business as Camas Winery, owned by Stuart Lauren Scott.

By 2010 Scott was running the winery from a Main Street storefront in Moscow, the college town about 30 miles to the west. That year the Lewiston Tribune found newspaper and magazine reviews plastered over the walls and shelves. Scott was pouring sweet wines, handmade champagne, and meads named Raspberry Honey and Palouse Gold. His best seller was a huckleberry dessert wine. The first taste was free and the next four cost $1.

The Tribune wrote that Scott “could be called the godfather of Idaho wine.” It described his business as Idaho’s oldest independent modern winery. In 2007 Wine Press Northwest had named it Idaho Winery of the Year. “A winery is kind of a lifestyle business. You do this because you enjoy it,” Scott told the paper. The Tribune counted six established wineries in the Lewiston, Clarkston, Moscow and Pullman area. Scott held that ten wineries within 30 miles could make the region a destination. Ready to retire again, he had put the winery up for sale.

He sold it in 2011 and wrote down what he had learned. In 2015 he gave the keynote at a wine industry workshop in Penticton, British Columbia, by then the author of Riding the Tiger, How to Create a Successful Winery During Tough Times. He had prepared the business for a buyer much as a franchise is prepared. He had written training and operations manuals, kept lists of suppliers and of 50 wholesale accounts, and offered 60 days of full-time help with the changeover. Scott sold the business but kept the property. “This was how I grew from an $18,000 start-up in my garage to a $250,000 business sale that kept a valuable property as an on-going source of rental income,” he wrote. Among his other lessons: “grapes are easier to grow, and wine is easier to make, than either is to sell.”

Thirty miles east, to Bovill

According to Great Northwest Wine, Jeremy Ritter bought the brand in Moscow about a decade before the magazine’s 2020 review. The magazine later wrote that Ritter carries on the mead tradition Scott began, calling him “perhaps the Northwest’s leader for mead.”

In 2013 the University of Idaho’s student paper, the Argonaut, found Jeremy and Heidi Ritter running a tasting bar and lounge in the front of the Moscow building, with the winemaking in back. A sampling bar ran along the right side of the room, and upstairs was a lounge large enough for parties. A hallway past the cashier’s desk led to the working rooms. There stood ten wooden barrels and a dozen plastic barrels of fermenting red wine, then a grape press and stainless steel tanks where the reds sat for three years. Meads were usually ready to bottle within six weeks. “This is a production house,” Ritter said. “Everything on the menu is produced here in the back.” At the time, 85 percent of the winery’s grapes were grown in Washington, and local honey, plums and huckleberries went into the sweeter wines.

In 2014 Ritter told the same paper that the winery used lightweight bottles and avoided harsh cleaning chemicals. “We’re the only winery in the state of Idaho, as far as I know… that (is) IDEQ (Idaho Department of Environmental Quality) approved,” he said. In 2015 the Strawberry Mead won a Platinum award.

Over the winter of 2015-16 the winery left downtown Moscow for Bovill. The Moscow location closed, though the winery’s Visit Idaho listing says it still came to the Moscow Farmers Market each week to pour tastings and sell bottles.

In Bovill, Ritter joined the Bovill Improvement Group. During the 2025-26 school year, students from the University of Idaho’s College of Art and Architecture drew plans for the town, including fire mitigation, RV park upgrades and the restoration of the Opera House. Ritter worked with a group of the art and design students on branding ideas for the city. “I think what the students have come up with has kind of opened up the eyes of some city council people and shown them what’s possible,” he said.

The winery’s own building is now under review. On May 30 the Idaho Historic Sites Review Board approved a nomination for a Bovill Historic Commercial District, and by July 2026 it had gone to the Keeper of the National Register for final review. The nomination covers two blocks of commerce tied to the railroad and the logging trade, from 1914 to the 1930s. The proposed district would take in the buildings on the south side of Main Street east of the railroad tracks: the Bailey’s, the Elk Saloon, the Post Office, the Conoco, and the Camas Prairie Winery.