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Winemaking Trailblazer: Bionic Wines' Christophe Baron
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Pioneer and revivalist at once, Christophe Baron produces some of Oregon’s most progressive wines
written and photographed by Daniel O’Neil
Toward the end of a five-hour tasting from his Bionic Wines portfolio, Christophe Baron shares the story behind his nickname, the Bionic Frog. In 1995, Baron, a Frenchman from Champagne, was working harvest in Australia’s Barossa Valley. On top of the fridge, his Australian roommate kept a bottle of sweet wine dubbed “sticky.” Baron wasn’t allowed to drink it: “Frog, don’t touch the sticky,” his friend would yell. “It’s for Christmas.” The guy always out-drank Baron, until one night. To celebrate, Baron enjoyed some sticky and left a glassful beside his passed-out friend.
In the morning, the Australian conceded defeat and proclaimed: “Okay, you’re not the Frog anymore. You’re the Bionic Frog!” The name stuck, and Baron had no idea where it would lead. One year later, he purchased 10 rocky acres of failed orchard land near Milton-Freewater, Oregon. The following spring, in these stones, he planted the first vines in what would become a premier winegrowing area of the Walla Walla Valley. Bionic Wines was born.
When he began planting vines in what he calls the “Stones”—but the wine industry calls The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater AVA (American Viticultural Area)—Baron earned another nickname. “People called me the Crazy Frenchman and said it wasn’t going to work,” he said. But when magazines like Wine Spectator awarded his 1999 vintage with high scores, recognizing the potential Baron had discovered, other winemakers followed in his tracks. “Then apple trees are coming out and vines are going in, and people stopped calling me crazy.”
Grown and made entirely in Oregon (minus the Champagne), the bottlings created by Baron and team represent some of the most desired, critically acclaimed, expensive and elaborately crafted wines in the country. But Baron’s success grew from much more than just a pioneering spirit.
The Baron family has been making wine in Champagne since 1677. Vineyard slopes surround the village, Charly-sur-Marne, where Christophe Baron grew up, and once he could walk, Baron followed his father and grandfather through the vines and cellar. He worked his first harvest at age 6, and went on to earn an enology degree, studying in Champagne and Burgundy.
Working under his father and two uncles at the family estate seemed like too many chefs in the kitchen, so Baron headed west. “What I did in twenty years here in America would have taken half a century in the Old World,” he said in his remnant French accent. “That’s the reason why I’m here.”
Originally, Baron sought to make pinot noir and chardonnay in the Willamette Valley, but he could only find a long-term internship in Walla Walla, where he worked the 1993 harvest. He worked the next harvest in the Willamette Valley, where he met with that wine region’s pioneer, David Lett, who showed Baron a property well beyond his modest budget. In 1995, Baron worked harvests in Australia, New Zealand and Romania. Still intent on settling in the Willamette Valley, in the spring of 1996, Baron stopped to retrieve his car at his friend Scott Byerley’s house near Milton-Freewater.
The evening before Baron was to leave for the Willamette Valley, he and Byerley were drinking wine and looking through a French vineyard atlas. “He pulls up a picture of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and says he’d love to find a place like that to plant grapes,” Byerley said. Like the Stones, Châteauneuf-du-Pape is famous for its cailloux, or cobblestones. “And I say, ‘Well, I know where that is here.’ He says, ‘Can we go there?’ And I say, ‘Well, not tonight!’”
Early the next morning, the two stopped at an empty parcel covered, like everything around it, in smooth rocks from the ancient Walla Walla riverbed. “It took him about thirty seconds to decide that this was where he wanted to go,” Byerley said. Baron held a pair of cailloux, threw them to the ground, and declared he would purchase these 10 acres and grow Rhone-inspired wines instead. He never left for the Willamette Valley.
Baron could afford land here because the property’s well was insufficient for an orchard, but it provided enough to drip-irrigate grapevines. After planting the Cailloux Vineyard in March 1997, Baron harvested a small crop in 1998 and bottled the first wines off the Stones.
“ The wine wasn’t even finished yet—it was still sweet and fermenting—but I knew I had something very special there,” Baron said. “So I said, ‘Okay, I need to buy more land.’”
Today, Baron owns 80 acres of vineyards outside of Milton-Freewater, plus 6 acres in Champagne. He oversees five projects—Cayuse, Horsepower, No Girls, Champagne Christophe Baron and Hors Catégorie—from which he creates thirty-five different wines, producing only 8,000 to 9,600 cases a year. Like his predecessors, Baron is a vigneron, meaning he grows the grapes, makes the wine, bottles it and sells it, with invaluable help from his team. All of Baron’s wines issue entirely from his own vineyards, allowing him complete control over how the wine is made, and especially how it’s grown.
In 1999, Baron opened the first commercial tasting room in downtown Walla Walla (now closed, because since 2003 his wines have sold only to mailing list members and select wine shops and restaurants). He was the first in Walla Walla to graft vines against phylloxera, and he brought other techniques over from Europe including whole-cluster fermentation and burying vines to protect from deep freeze. Recently, he has installed several 750,000-gallon ponds for irrigation in summer. Few have had such an influence on wine in the Pacific Northwest, or in the United States.
“Christophe is a maverick in terms of what he’s done,” said fellow Stones vigneron Matt Reynvaan, who has known, and learned from, Baron since 2005. “He’s been on the forefront of so many things that other people here in this valley didn’t think about. There is nothing that Christophe won’t do to create the best possible wines and vineyards.”
For someone as obsessed with precision and definition as Baron, names matter greatly. Baron is happy to see others making wine from the terroir he uncovered, but he thinks The Rocks District, actually a sub-AVA of the Walla Walla Valley AVA, is premature, a distraction, like learning to run before learning to walk.
Baron believes the Walla Walla Valley AVA still lacks attention of its own. When he travels domestically and in Europe, Baron likes to ask sommeliers to guess where he owns a wine estate in America. They never suggest Walla Walla.
“Those days will come for sub-appellations or districts in the Walla Walla Valley, but for the time being our energy should be in promoting and marketing Walla Walla as a whole,” Baron said.
Such a view might not please many in the Walla Walla Valley, but Baron is naturally a black sheep. “I think most of the wine industry sees him as an outlier,” said Harvey Steiman, who first wrote about Baron in Wine Spectator in 1998. “They say, ‘Christophe does his thing, and we do ours.’ But he recognized the potential of what has now become a very important winegrowing area in the United States. That’s enough distinction right there.”
Viticultural practices also set Baron apart from many in the Stones. He detests synthetic pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, what he calls “forces of death,” and he does not see why he would join The Rocks District AVA to collaborate with conventional chemical-spraying growers. “If they’re really trying to copy us, it should be in the farming,” he said. “They can have the Rocks. I have the Stones.”
Admittedly spiritual but not religious, Baron nurtures a close relationship with the natural world, which he developed while growing up in the vineyards and on his grandparents’ farm.
“Mother Nature is the master, and we are the servants, not the other way around,” he said. “You always have to keep this mentality and this approach. The ‘take, take, take’ mentality cannot last forever.”
From the first vine he planted in Cailloux Vineyard, Baron has farmed organically. Since 2002, all Bionic Wines vineyards have been farmed biodynamically. (Biodynamics takes organic farming and adds the cosmos—the lunar calendar, for example. It seeks to enhance biodiversity and soil health through a holistic approach.) While Burgundy abounds with biodynamic winegrowers, and the Willamette Valley is home to about a dozen, Baron remains the only biodynamic producer in the Walla Walla Valley, a fact that, he said, “blows [his] mind.”
Besides applying biodynamics and eschewing synthetic chemicals, Baron and his team make compost on-site. Its purpose is not to feed the vines but to add life and texture to the topsoil and subsoil. Baron and team also plant buffers of trees, shrubs and flowers, some of them a quarter-mile long, around his vineyards to enhance the Stones ecosystem. “Without buffers, pretty soon you’ll be able to see Milton-Freewater because people are pulling out trees, and there will only be vineyards,” Baron said.
Reynvaan appreciates his neighbor’s approach. “I love the regenerative spirit and how Christophe puts so much into giving back to the soils,” Reynvaan said. “You see the health of the vines and the environment that he creates, and everything feels very much alive. I don’t see anyone else doing that. It takes a significant investment, but Christophe doesn’t spare any expense, and you can’t argue with the results.”
Baron’s devotion to natural farming reaches its apex in his Horsepower project, where five horses and three dedicated teamsters turn the soil without machines. Back in Champagne, Baron’s grandfather replaced horses with a tractor in 1957. In 2008, Christophe Baron revived the tradition, in the Stones, using horses and equipment imported from France.
The Horsepower team works 20 acres, which, considering its dense spacing, is the equivalent of about 50 acres of regular Walla Walla vineyard—50 total miles of vines, six to ten times a year. The vineyard benefits extend to soil structure, vine longevity, climate change resilience and deeper roots into terroir. “If this were for show, we’d only be doing 2 acres,” Baron said.
"Let me tell you something: I’m French and I have a big ego, and in terms of wine creation, it’s important to put that ego aside,” Baron said. “Let Mother Nature do the job. She does a very good job when you don’t try to interfere. It’s the same with wine—every time you interfere, you’re losing something.”
Baron’s respect for the land flows directly into the winemaking process. In what he and his team call the “wine studio,” creativity and expertise meet healthy, terroir-infused fruit. The results speak for themselves: So far, twenty-eight Bionic Wines bottlings have earned 100-point ratings, more than any other winery in Oregon or Washington.
Baron appreciates the recognition, but high scores are just a byproduct of his pursuits as a vigneron. “Christophe is devoted to respecting the land and the fruit, to making wines and farming in a more traditional way,” said Elizabeth Bourcier, resident vigneronne (winegrower and winemaker) at Bionic Wines.
Bourcier, a Seattle native, has worked for Bionic Wines since 2008 and is responsible for much of the wine studio efforts because Baron cannot be everywhere at once. “Christophe never stops,” she said. “It’s unbelievable, his energy for life, and for everything. It can be shocking sometimes.”
Bourcier’s calm demeanor balances Baron’s focused frenzy, and her passion for creating the finest wines matches his. For instance, each wine they create is composed of up to a dozen individually vinified lots, which Bourcier and team blend, over and over, until they get it just right. Few have the patience or the will to go to such extremes in winemaking.
“Christophe is an innovator, and he has a lot of enthusiasm about knowledge and learning,” Bourcier said. “He’s always taking things he learns or sees, talking to people in different parts of the world, and bringing it here. But the success story comes from just putting the work into the vineyards, the biodynamic part of it, and then the low-intervention way of creating quality wines. There are no tricks here.”
None of this success would be possible without a committed team. “One of the things that speaks to Christophe’s character immensely is how many people have been with him for so many years,” Byerley said. “He treats people that work for him really well, and they appreciate it, and they work hard.”
Hopping around from vineyard to vineyard, from wine studio to national wine events and tastings, and over to France twice a year, where his sister and cousins help grow and create Champagne Christophe Baron from the family vineyards, Baron recognizes his good fortune. “It’s one thing to have the vision, the idea, the dream,” Baron said. “But without the team, you can’t put anything together.”
Baron and team make mostly red wines from the Stones: syrah, grenache, cabernet sauvignon and franc, merlot, tempranillo. Like all Stones wines, those from Bionic Wines present a distinct flavor profile that does not suggest Walla Walla. Red and dark fruits mingle mysteriously with umami notes of tobacco leaf, meat, bacon fat, wet rocks, seaweed and, most notably, an underriding scent of something like truffles—some call this The Rocks funk, but Baron refers to it as savoriness. Either way, wines from the Stones are not for everyone.
Baron is first to admit this: “It’s the same with art. You can’t please everybody with your painting.” Steiman recalls the first tastings of wines off the Stones. “They stood out, and there were a lot of people who mistook the character of wines growing on stones like that for some faults in the wines,” he said. “Christophe got blowback from some purists who said these didn’t taste like other Washington wines. But it was just the natural character. There was a texture and a flavor profile that was unique in the United States.”
Only five years after his first vintage, Baron’s wines began selling out each year. Today they are nearly impossible to find. “He can’t help but be a cult winery, because he doesn’t have enough juice to go around,” Steiman said.
The crown jewel in the Bionic Wines portfolio grows on a canyonside slope above the North Fork of the Walla Walla River, in the Oregon foothills of the Blue Mountains. Steep as a black-diamond ski run, with loose, rocky soil and frequent rattlesnakes, no one on Earth had ever envisioned planting a vineyard here. But to Baron it resembled France’s northern Rhone Valley. Hors Catégorie, he named it: uncategorizable. Baron purchased the property in 2005 and spent six years developing 2 immaculate acres of syrah, at considerable expense. It’s the one property he would never consider selling. “It’s not always about the money,” Baron said. “It’s also about the challenge, pushing the envelope. I’ve always loved a challenge.”
Hors Catégorie produces only 1,500 to 2,000 bottles of wine a year. Since its appearance in 2014, each vintage has earned 99- or 100-point scores. Predictably, other wineries are now planting along the North Fork.
In Baron’s Hors Catégorie project, longtime friend and fellow French winemaker Virginie Bourgue, who worked for a decade in Walla Walla, recognizes traits from both the Old and the New World. “Christophe has this vision, like he’s always looking twenty or fifty years into the future,” she said. “And that’s because of his French heritage. What he’s got really close to American culture is his drive, his motivation. He’s not afraid to take risks and to go for what he believes in.”
Reynvaan agrees. “He’s a little crazy to take the chance on something like Hors Catégorie,” he said. “But it’s awesome because we need people like that to push the rest of the valley forward.”
For now, Baron admits he has no plans for future projects. Rather than expand outward and acquire more vineyard land, he is pushing the boundaries upward, pursuing quality and precision. “Add a Willamette Valley wine to the portfolio, and then what else?” Baron said. “It’s distracting for me, and my team wouldn’t be able to take the right amount of time with each wine to create the best possible blend. Hors Catégorie is the project of my life, and guess what, on top of that the wine tastes great.”
