Darby English of Darby Winery
Darby English mainly studied golf and girls at Arizona State University, while also completing a marketing degree. His goal was to be a professional golfer. But when he returned to Seattle in 2001, the fledgling Woodinville wine scene drew him in. He started making wine in his garage while working in pharmaceutical sales as a day job. In 2005, Darby started producing wine commercially, and two years later received significant recognition from Wine Spectator. He remembers those early days in Woodinville fondly, highlighting the strong sense of community, mutual support, and infectious excitement. Today there are well over 100 tasting rooms in Woodinville, and everyone is striving to provide a unique tasting environment and experience. In addition to a tasting room in West Seattle, Darby Winery recently opened a new, must-visit tasting room in Woodinville. It offers spacious bar seating, edgy art, a library, antique fixtures, and a secret, intimate tasting room complete with vintage wallpaper, record player, and plenty of vinyl. It’s appropriately named the Needledrop Lounge.
Darby has always been partial to Rhone style wines, and you will find plenty of those in the tasting rooms. But he also makes Bordeaux style wines, especially from Red Mountain. Perhaps his most well-known wine is Purple Haze, first produced in 2007. It is without a doubt one of the finest wines you will have for $20 a bottle. The blend changes each year, but the outstanding quality is consistent from one year to the next. Darby enjoys the blending process, but also likes to make single-varietal wines. What he makes often depends on grape yields, which can fluctuate wildly from year to year. Darby cites this fluctuation as just one of the many things that make winemaking very chaotic, and he even has a wine called Chaos to reflect this aspect of winemaking.
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