Our Story

Garagistes Caleb Foster and Nina Buty Foster welcomed Buty Winery’s first vintage in 2000. Buty is the actualization of our vision developed after long planning and a decade of Washington State and New Zealand vintages. Now nine vintages deep at Buty, we continue to focus our efforts in the vineyard as well as in the cellar. We offer small cuvées of terroir driven wines, grown with balanced yields and ripeness.


We create four proprietary blends of white and red wines. These four are our blend of sémillon, sauvignon and muscadelle, our merlot and cabernet franc blend, the Columbia Rediviva from the Horse Heaven Hills and the Rediviva of the Stones from the Walla Walla Valley. The Rediviva wines are complementary blends of syrah and cabernet sauvignon. Buty is the first Washington State winery focusing on the deluxe blend of syrah and cabernet sauvignon. We are pleased others in Washington are following our lead.


In addition we craft vineyard-designated chardonnay, which we prefer pure, from Conner Lee Vineyard on Radar Hill.


Since the spring of 2001 we have worked with Californian consultant Zelma Long. Zelma’s multiple decades of worldwide winegrowing and winemaking offer a great breadth of wine and vine knowledge and a “whole business” perspective to Buty.


We happily announce that the Buty Estate Rockgarden Vineyard has arrived in the Walla Walla Appellation. Rockgarden is located in Milton-Freewater’s Grand Cru section of the ancestral Walla Walla River -- in the 5% highest elevation of the cobblestones. This has been the most prized farming section for one hundred years. We waited years to buy only here. Anywhere else further out in the cobblestones would have been a compromise. We have planted our vineyard for one wine -- the Rediviva of the Stones. Naturally, our wine and land is organic. We’re pleased the local environment benefits from our vineyard. By removing the apples and planting vines, use only one tenth of the annual water consumption, saving this water for the river environment. At Rockgarden we grow clones of syrah, cabernet sauvignon, grenache, mourvèdre, marsanne and rousanne, densely planted to 4300 plants per hectare or 1790 plants per acre.


We source our Columbia Valley Appellation wines from six great estate grown vineyards. Caleb’s experience making wine from Champoux and Conner Lee Vineyards spans 16 vintages since 1992. All winegrowing stages are all maintained to Buty’s specific goals from pruning to shoot positioning, pre-véraison cluster thinning, water and pest management, and the day and the time of harvest. We exclusively harvest by hand and hand berry sort on a shaker table before fermentation.


In our cellar, we ferment all wine in small lots based on their vineyard blocks. We mix manually three times daily and use a custom fresh air injection tool. We use the gentlest wine movement methods possible, which often translates to hand carrying must in small vessels, gravity flow, or pressurized gas. Buty’s white and red wines mature in cooperage dominated by French barrels -- balanced between new and older oak. Our chardonnays are lees stirred the majority of their lives in barrel. Bottling is done in house so that the wines are bottled precisely when mature. We are adamant about directly attending to the minutia of details in winemaking and winegrowing, and practicing techniques that highlight the grape’s transition into bottle. Because of our philosophy, we would never use dehydrators, concentrators, water additions, spinning cones, or other such “enhancement tools”.


The philosophy of winegrowing and winemaking at Buty is one of balance, artisanship and enjoyment, as we aim to capture the essence of the grape in bottle.


Buty is one hundred percent owned by Caleb Foster and Nina Buty Foster.