The Four Graces

Stewardship at the cellar door

Tim Jones guides Pinot Noir toward the cellar as winemaker at The Four Graces in Dundee Hills, where estate fruit sets the pace. Since 2018, he has held the winemaker post here, carrying a path that moved through Willamette University, the University of California, Davis, Washington State University, harvest work in Sonoma County, tasting-room management at Fiddlehead Cellars in Davis, and winemaking at Ste. Michelle Wine Estates in Eastern Washington. That route matters because it gives his work more than one register. He has worked the rush of harvest, the questions that come across a tasting-room counter, the technical language of Davis and Washington State, and the scale of a larger cellar.

Tim Jones speaks about the job as stewardship: “We’re stewarding these grapes on their journey to wine, much the same as we do with kids.” The phrase is not decorative. It places the maker beside living material, watching timing, condition, and response rather than forcing a fixed idea onto fruit. His own account of the trade joins “collaborative, hard physical work” with “geeky science” and a life connected to “nature and the seasons and the ground.” At The Four Graces, those elements meet in an estate winery whose discipline rests on patience as much as intervention.

Estate fruit in the Dundee Hills AVA

The program centers on still wines from the Willamette Valley, with Pinot Noir as the central red and Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, and Chardonnay giving the cellar its white-wine frame. The house works sustainably and at estate scale, with fruit drawn from four estate vineyards across Willamette Valley AVAs. In Dundee Hills, that means Jones does not begin with abstraction. He begins with varieties, vineyard rhythm, and the weather of a place known for red hills and cool-season tension.

The wines here are described through elegance rather than weight, a useful word only when the cellar earns it by restraint. Jones’s background helps explain the shape of the work: the science to read fermenting material, the harvest labor to respect timing, the hospitality experience to understand how a bottle arrives at the table.

The tasting room above the vines

The room gives the wine a quiet setting rather than a stage. The Four Graces sits in the Red Hills of Dundee, with a modern tasting space beside the older farmhouse character of the property and vineyard views that open toward the hills. Inside, the pace is seated and calm; outside, the view carries rows, slope, and weather into the glass. The winery offers indoor and outdoor tasting, food pairing, and a tasting room shaped for attention rather than noise.

That setting matters for Jones’s work because the counter completes part of the circuit he has known since Fiddlehead Cellars. Wine leaves the cellar and meets the drinker in the same landscape that helped make it. The glass and the ground frame Pinot Noir from The Four Graces, poured with the Dundee Hills AVA still in view.