Fujishin Estate Winery

The tasting room of Fujishin Estate Winery stands on Allendale Road outside Wilder, Idaho, with vineyards below it and the Snake River Valley beyond. It opens at noon every day except New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Tables are reserved for parties of up to eight, and the count includes anyone who will not taste. The winery serves no food, so visitors bring their own. Dogs come indoors and out on a leash, and both restrooms have changing tables.

The current releases are poured in flights. The winery describes them as “wind shaped wines,” made “where desert sun meets volcanic soil.” The list goes beyond the Riesling, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon on which the Idaho trade was built, to Graciano, Petite Sirah, Mourvèdre, Albariño, and Tempranillo. Martin Fujishin, the co-founder, told the Idaho Wine Commission in 2021 that Tempranillo was then his favorite. The commission notes that his surname is pronounced like “magician.” “Tempranillo is a little bit more difficult from a growing perspective, but it’s in many ways Idaho’s answer to Pinot,” he said. “It’s a slightly lighter red, but it has a lot of that same character.” Great Northwest Wine gave the flagship red in 2024 as Amatino, a Rhône-inspired wine. A 2015 photograph in the same publication shows Fujishin adding clusters of Viognier to Syrah at harvest, the two grapes fermented together in the style of Côte-Rôtie.

Bat boxes on the ridge

The estate vineyard is called Windseeker, a young planting at 2,600 feet near Wilder. The Idaho Wine Commission describes it as a big ridge line with plenty of wind, southern exposure, and air drainage, intended as the home of the winery’s high-end reds, with some production on site. The land first belonged to former Gov. Phil Batt. The Idaho Capital Sun reported in July 2021 that Fujishin had bought it three years earlier. Employees dug the holes and set the vines. “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a family to run a winery,” Fujishin said that year. The same crew returned in the fall of 2021 to pick the first grapes.

The Capital Sun’s reporter found 13.5 acres with cover crops between the rows: mixed mustard in spring, winter wheat through the cold season, alfalfa flowers in between. Walking through the brush flushed out lacewings, which eat aphids. On a tall pole at the top of the hill hung wooden bat boxes that hold up to 300 bats. Red-tailed hawk roosts and barn owl boxes stood elsewhere on the property, which also gave habitat to bees and quail. Water went out by drip line, metered to each section by soil-moisture readings. A weather station built with Boise State University stood in the middle of the vineyard, logging soil and temperature from year to year. The paper observed that the farmer Fujishin had been raised to be in Adrian, Oregon, would have kept the ground between the rows spotless.

That first harvest was all red, Syrah and Graciano among it, planted partly to test what would hold up under drought and heat. “Variability is a real challenge in that every year it’s like writing a new rulebook, really,” Fujishin said. Great Northwest Wine reported in 2024 that he and Teresa Moye, the co-founder, live in a house in the Sunnyslope Wine District that was once Batt’s home, with sweeping views of the valley.

A packing shed on Sunny Slope Road

Adrian sits on the west side of the Snake River, northwest of Caldwell, and Fujishin put its population at about 150. He and his brother grew up there on a 200-acre farm that raised row crops and specialty seeds. He is Japanese on his father’s side and French-Norwegian on his mother’s. His great-grandfather came from Japan in the early 1900s and later ran a restaurant in Boise. His father was born in a labor camp in Caldwell. His mother grew up in Horseshoe Bend, and the two met at what is now the College of Idaho. Martin took a business degree there in 2000.

In 2003 he started work in the Koenig Vineyards tasting room in Caldwell. He spent three years there on weekends and rose from attendant to tasting room manager. After a year as a counselor at Idaho Youth Ranch he returned in 2007. Ron Bitner hired him as vineyard manager, and Greg Koenig, who made Bitner’s wine, took him on as cellarmaster. At harvest Fujishin kept proposing changes to the wines, until Koenig spoke up. “He said, ‘You know what you need to have? You need to have your own winery.’” With Koenig’s help, Fujishin Family Cellars began in 2009 with a few hundred cases made under the Koenig roof. From 2009 to 2013 Fujishin also taught viticulture and enology at Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, Oregon, a program funded by a federal grant.

The first tasting room was a fruit-packing shed on Sunny Slope Road, near Ste. Chapelle. The Robison family built it in 1943 and packed fruit there until 1967, when it became a storage building. In 2000 they refurbished it as a fruit stand. Fujishin took over the operation in 2006 and turned it into his tasting room after the Robisons retired from the fruit business. When Idaho approved refillable wine growlers in the spring of 2015, he was among the first to sell them. A first growler, slightly smaller than a liter, cost $25 with the wine in it, and refills drawn from a keg cost $13. “A lot of customers come in every Friday to refill their wine for the weekend,” he said that fall. Nearly all of the 2,000 cases made that year were sold over the shed’s counter.

Riesling, a hot brand, and Walla Walla

In 2017 Wine Business Monthly named Fujishin Family Cellars one of its Hot Brands. It was the second Idaho winery to receive the honor, after Cinder Wines in 2009. That year’s vintage was hard. After winter and weather damage in Idaho vineyards, production fell from 3,000 cases to about 1,200. In the spring of 2018 Wine Press Northwest named the winery its Idaho Winery of the Year. At the 2018 Idaho Wine Competition, judged at Koenig Vineyards, Fujishin’s 2017 Late Harvest Riesling won best sweet wine. Best of show went to a 2017 Riesling he made under his Lost West Winery label, from a 37-year-old block leased from Bitner. Fujishin said the block stood on the second-highest point in Canyon County. “We make our living with red wines and use Riesling to win awards,” Koenig said.

In 2024 Walla Walla Community College in Washington hired Fujishin as director of its enology and viticulture program and its teaching winery, College Cellars. He kept primary ownership in Idaho. Capital Press described the company that year as Fujishin Family Cellars, the Wilder parent of the Fujishin Estate and Free Dog Wines brands. Free Dog keeps its own tasting room on Sunnyslope Road in Caldwell. The two labels together made about 6,000 cases. About 20 people worked for the business. Winemaking passed to Jill Hawkins, the assistant winemaker and viticulturist, while Drake Kuykendall and Brittany Woodworth took on more of the management. Production continued with the Koenig Vineyards crew. Moye, operations director and Fujishin’s fiancée, moved to Walla Walla and travels to Wilder as needed. Fujishin was 45 when he took the post. “Even if I put in a good number of years with the community college that still gives me time to be a hermit on the hill if I want to,” he told Great Northwest Wine.