Clearwater Canyon Cellars

The vines of Umiker Estate Vineyard surround the winery on all sides. They grow at 1,350 feet on the edge of a broad bench east of Lewiston, above the Clearwater River, in a deep silt loam of the Oliphant series. The slope tilts gently north, so cool air drains off the rows and down toward the water. The rows hold Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Cabernet franc, Chardonnay, Viognier and Riesling. Karl Umiker, vineyard manager and co-owner, is known as the “Vine Whisperer.” He is often out among them without his phone, walking slowly and taking notes.

The tasting room on the bench

The tasting room is inside the estate winery, on the family’s Idaho Century Farm in the Lewiston Orchards. The Idaho Department of Agriculture’s Century Farm plaque hangs on its wall. Children come with their parents. Dogs wait on the patio, since only service animals are allowed indoors. Visitors may bring food to eat with a tasting, but nothing aromatic. The winery gives hot pizza as the example, because the smell would interfere with other people’s tasting. Lily Gregor, raised on a farm in Lenore, manages the room. Jace Younker, the enologist, a University of Idaho graduate in fermentation science, sometimes pours.

Animals turn up around the farm too. A rabbit the winery calls Macaroni eats the unwanted shoots at the base of the vines. His companion Pastrami, along with deer, foxes, turkeys, frogs and songbirds, also appears through the season. In August 2026 the Umiker Estate Farm Stand sold “Corny But Sweet,” a bicolor sweet corn grown on the farm, during tasting room hours, and the winery suggested eating it with the estate Syrah. By early September the Chardonnay and Riesling had been picked. That opened what Coco Umiker calls the “grape avalanche”: fruit coming in, fermentations under way in the cellar, and wine still being poured out front.

Coco is the winemaker. She holds a doctorate from Washington State University on Dekkera bruxellensis, a spoilage yeast in red wine. Her winery biography notes that she mostly saves the subject for industry conferences, because it is “a bit of a buzz kill at happy hour.” Mike Haberman is the cellar master and viticulturist. He grew up on a cattle ranch on the Grande Ronde River and helped plant Rock n’ J Vineyard there in 2010. Beyond the estate, the winery buys fruit from growers across the Lewis-Clark Valley and central Washington. These include the Arnett family’s Cabernet Sauvignon in Clarkston, one of the oldest post-Prohibition plantings in the valley, and Phinny Hill in the Horse Heaven Hills, which has supplied fruit since the first vintage in 2004.

Irene’s farm

The farm’s story begins in 1916. That year George and Irene Nichols sold their farm at Ilo, now Craigmont, and moved closer to Lewiston so their four children, Gladys, Bernice, Helen and Ralph, could get more schooling. Great Northwest Wine reported that the Iowa-born couple paid $25 an acre for 560 acres of wheat and cattle ground, when Ralph was one year old. According to the Idaho Wine Commission, the homesteaders who sold it had built a modest house and little else. Over the next four years the Nicholses raised animals, planted a small orchard and grew grain.

In 1920 George died of a ruptured appendix at 46. Irene was left with the farm, a mortgage and four children, and she ran the place through the Depression. Sip Magazine records that she saw all four through Lewiston High School and Lewiston State Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College. “I heard many stories about people trying to take advantage of Irene and the situation,” Coco said in 2020. “She was a pretty shrewd businesswoman. She could think on her feet pretty quickly and obviously was a very tough lady to make it through all that.” Irene lived to 94. The winery’s press is named for her, and in November 2020 the Umikers released a red blend called “Irene Nichols.”

Ralph took over the farm in 1936 after finishing at Lewiston Normal School. He added a herd of purebred Herefords, and the place became known as the Nichols Hereford Ranch. He ran it until 1984 and lived 95 of his 96 years there. In 2011 he sold 310 acres to the City of Lewiston for a community park, a walking path around the wheat ground farmed by the crop-sharing Kaufman family, and the site of a future Lewiston High School. City and school officials knew private developers had offered him more. The city manager called the sale “a visionary gift that generations of Lewiston families will be thankful for to the Nichols family, forever.”

A quarter acre and a 1952 Ford

Coco grew up in Boise and spent her childhood summers on the farm. She survived ovarian cancer at 11 and planned to become a medical doctor. According to the Lewiston Tribune, in the spring of her senior year of high school she rode in the Washington state road bicycle championship. There she introduced herself to Karl, a University of Idaho graduate student who had just finished second. He had grown up in Northwest Arkansas racing mountain bikes and was working on a master’s degree in soil science.

At school in Moscow the two came to know Bob Wing of Lewiston, a historian, writer and professional weatherman. Wing had planted a test vineyard in 1972 at the urging of Washington State University’s Walter Clore, and he spent decades collecting the valley’s wine records, photographs and clippings. Those records went back a long way. In 1864, according to Edible Idaho, a few acres of Royal Muscadine were planted in Lewiston. Sip Magazine credits the Frenchman Louis Delsol with importing the first grape cuttings to his farm on the Clearwater in 1872. Sip also cites a 1908 Lewiston Tribune article reporting that local grapes had beaten California’s in international competition. Accounts of the industry’s size differ. Sip counts more than 80 acres of grapes by the early 1900s. Earl Bennett of the Idaho Historical Society spoke of three estate wineries and more than 200 acres. Then the counties voted dry in 1909, the state went dry in 1916, and the vineyards were pulled out.

“There was all this history, all this evidence of this potential, confirmed by Bob’s wines,” Karl said later. “We realized all that was missing was someone doing something about it.” At 21, Coco asked her grandfather for permission to lease ground on the farm for a vineyard. Ralph had seen the old vineyards for himself. In 2003, at 89, he drove the family’s 1952 9N Ford tractor to prepare the land and dig the holes for vines and posts. Great Northwest Wine and Coco’s own 2016 remarks put that first planting at a quarter acre of Merlot. In Sip she calls it “the first acre.” “I think a lot of people thought we were insane,” Coco recalled. At the time there were no wineries in Lewiston.

Coco and Karl married in 2004. They wanted to call the planting Nichols Vineyard, but Ralph insisted on Umiker. “You put the work into it, you bought everything that went into that vineyard,” Coco remembered him saying. “It was your money, your sweat and tears.” That same year the couple and three other couples started Clearwater Canyon Cellars. Their first wine, 100 cases of 2004 Renaissance Red, was made from four barrels in a garage in the Lewiston Orchards. Coco spent that vintage working weekdays as an enologist at Whitman Cellars in Walla Walla, a hundred miles away, and coming home on weekends to make wine. The first Umiker Vineyard Merlot was picked in 2005. The winery’s history counts it as the first wine grown and made in the Lewis-Clark Valley from vitis vinifera grapes since Prohibition.

Night work at the Port of Lewiston

In 2007 production moved from the garage to an incubator unit in an industrial park at the Port of Lewiston, across the Clearwater River. A small-business subsidy helped pay for it. “When we started the winery, we lived in a trailer for $250 bucks a month,” Coco said. In 2010 the Umikers bought out their partners. The winery’s timeline adds: “We are all still friends!” In 2011 Ralph died, Coco finished her doctorate, and Karl left his research post at the University of Idaho to work full time on the vineyard and winery. In 2012 Coco gave up her teaching job at Lewis-Clark State College to join him.

The Port building had no drain in the floor. To clean equipment, the Umikers strapped it to the forklift and drove it outside. The 2014 harvest brought in more than 50 tons of grapes, the most the winery had ever handled. They pressed it outdoors on a manual press that took both of their strength to push and pull, often leaving their hands bloody. They worked at night so the days stayed free for deliveries to restaurants. One night that fall, Coco photographed Karl, wet and shivering under several old wool sweaters. “I had this feeling we were in this pivotal moment,” she told the Lewiston Tribune. “We both knew we couldn’t go through another harvest like that. We had hit our max of suffering.”

The next year Wine Press Northwest named Clearwater Canyon the Idaho Winery of 2015, and sales grew. The Umikers bought a mechanized press, one of only eight its maker builds each year, and hired Mike Haberman. “Having good help was life changing,” Coco said.

The hundredth year

On Friday, July 1, 2016, about 40 family members and friends gathered in the Lewiston Orchards as Earl Bennett, a trustee of the Idaho Historical Society, declared the Nichols Family Farm an official Idaho century farm. By then the farm covered 57 acres, 6.5 of them in vines. Coco told the crowd her grandfather had refused to let them use his name. “He probably was thinking, ‘This is going to be a train wreck, and I don’t want my name on it, so please name it Umiker,’” she said. The gathering roared. Ralph’s 101st birthday would have fallen the next day. “This would have been the last day that he was 100 years old, and this is our 100th anniversary of the farm,” Coco said. That evening she opened a bottle of the 2013 Heritage Series Ralph E. Nichols Red Wine for a toast.

That summer the 5,000-square-foot estate winery was going up on the farm. “It will be a metal building and gray, so it will blend in with the other gray buildings on the farm,” Coco said. “And it’s going to be really well-insulated with a nice drain in the floor.” The plan for a later phase was to turn the white concrete-block carriage house her great-grandfather built around 1919 into a tasting room. Bennett judged that building a strong candidate for the National Historic Register. The Lewis-Clark Valley American Viticultural Area was also designated in 2016, after a petition the Umikers helped lead with Mike Pearson and Melissa Sanborn of Colter’s Creek and Washington State University geologist Alan Busacca.

In 2017 the 2014 Coco’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, grown in the valley, earned the winery its tenth Platinum medal in Wine Press Northwest’s annual judging. In 2020 the magazine named Clearwater Canyon its Pacific Northwest Winery of the Year, a first for Idaho, and Coco became only the second woman winemaker to receive the award. The Platinum count has grown in each telling. The Idaho Wine Commission credited Coco with 17 in 2020. Sip Magazine counted 51 in 2025. The winery’s own homepage now lists 56. Stella Umiker worked her first harvest with her parents in 2021.

“Irene’s determination to persevere through seemingly insurmountable obstacles continues to be a source of great strength for us as life and vintages throw curveballs at us,” Coco told Sip. “I like to say that when the wind blows, we lean into it and carry on.”