Crafting a Sense of Place — The FIGGINS Journey
Some wines don’t just tell a story — they become one.
Jan de Weerd - Spoken Wines
This will hide itself!
Crafting a Sense of Place — The FIGGINS Journey
Some wines don’t just tell a story — they become one.
With FIGGINS Wines, Chris Figgins has built more than vineyards and cellars: he has built a legacy, a home for his passions, and a canvas for generations. It’s the story of a man who made a call home, and a place that answered back.
When we sat down with Chris Figgins, CEO and Winemaking Director of Figgins Family Wine Estates (which includes Leonetti Cellar) in Walla Walla, WA, the conversation wasn’t just about wine. It was about legacy. About the land that shapes us — and the decisions that define us.
For us at Spoken Wines, this story is also personal. Chris and I share more than a love of wine. We share roots in the soil — both sons of farmers. Both studied horticulture at Washington State University. Both once young men pulled between the horizon and home.
But our stories diverge at one pivotal moment — a moment that shaped the rest of our lives.
The Call That Changed Everything
For Chris, it was a call home.
He had set out on a different path — architecture, structure, design. He was drawn to geometry, building, lines — the creative, structural side of making things. But there came a moment when he realized the office, the screen, would not satisfy him. He didn’t want walls; he wanted rows. He didn’t want to draw blueprints; he wanted to shape landscapes.
So he picked up the phone and called his dad — Gary Figgins, founder of Leonetti Cellar. He asked if he could return, shift his major to horticulture. He wanted to farm, to grow, to shape with his hands.
With that “yes,” Chris joined the family business in 1996. That one call set in motion what would become his own imprint on the family’s legacy.
For me, that call never happened.
I grew up on a thriving potato farm in the Netherlands — countless generations of hard work, weathered hands, and family dinners that revolved around harvests and seasons. Like Chris, I studied horticulture. Like Chris, I loved working outside — the smell of the air, the feel of soil in my hands.
But I never made that call.
And because of that, our farm — our legacy — ended. It’s something that still stirs deeply when I stand in a field and smell freshly turned earth. There’s both pride and pain in that memory — of knowing what was lost, and what was built in its place.
"I called Dad, and asked him his thoughts about creating estate vineyards, give employment to me."
Building a Legacy — “The Perfect Site”
When Chris returned home, he threw himself into the family work. Vineyard by vineyard, he learned the rhythms of his father’s craft — pruning, pressing, tasting. But over time, he began to see his own vision forming.
He wanted to create something of his own — a vineyard and wine that expressed not just the family legacy, but his personal calling. Something that spoke directly of place.
Then fate — or intuition — intervened. One day, he saw a “for sale” sign being put up on a beautiful south-facing slope above Mill Creek. He pulled it as soon as the realtor left and loaded it into the back of his truck. He wasn’t necessarily looking for land, but something about that site screamed potential.
It checked many boxes: high elevation (1,500–1,750 ft), south/southwest exposure, soils of fractured basalt overlain by loess (wind‐deposited silt), strong air drainage, sharp temperature swings between day and night, just enough rainfall to allow a near dry-farmed feel, and a good slope to shed cold air and frost risk.
He knew. “This is the perfect site.”
He proposed it to his parents. They hesitated — they didn’t want to expand Leonetti further. But with their blessing, and under his own label, he acquired it. That hillside northeast of town became FIGGINS Estate, where Chris crafted a Sense of Place.
"The Perfect Site"
The Wine, the Legacy, and What It Means to Pass It On
The Bordeaux-inspired vineyard is planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. “Varietals are just a lens to see a site,” Chris says.
The wines carry the voice of that place: concentrated yet refined, structured yet elegant. You can taste the altitude and nighttime chill through its vibrancy — the slow ripening that gives fruit both power and grace. The soil whispers through the glass — a quiet minerality, a kind of tension that reflects its place.
The winery itself is elevated both literally and spiritually above the valley floor, built into the hillside where 80% of the footprint resides, with caves carved into solid rock beneath the vineyard. It feels more like a continuation of the land than a structure upon it.
Chris holds the legacy he’s built not as a fixed heritage carved in stone, but as a canvas for future generations — “not cemented in permanence,” he says. He hopes his daughters — and those who come after — will feel welcome to add to the story: to bring their own ideas, learn from mistakes, and grow what has been planted.
Closing Reflection
At Spoken Wines, our mission is to connect the family who makes the wine with the family who drinks it.
In Chris’s story, we found something more — a connection between two farmers at heart, bound by the same soil and separated only by a single, life-defining phone call. Both paths shaped who we became. Chris carried forward his family’s story by returning to it. I found mine by migrating to the United States and pursuing a career in agriculture and now, through Spoken Wines, giving voice to others who, like him, let the land speak through them.
His estate, carved into the hillside, stands as living proof that when you follow your calling — literally — you can create a sense of place so strong, it becomes eternal.
