Dunham Cellars, Walla Walla: The Art, the Dog, and a Lasting Legacy
Inside the people who carried a family vision forward and shaped one of Walla Walla’s iconic wineries.
Tammy de Weerd - Spoken Wines
This will hide itself!
Dunham Cellars, Walla Walla: The Art, the Dog, and a Lasting Legacy
Inside the people who carried a family vision forward and shaped one of Walla Walla’s iconic wineries.
The old hangar Dunham Cellars calls home still carries Eric Dunham’s fingerprints.
The founder. The dreamer. The winery’s first winemaker—left far too early.
They are there in the paintings hanging on the walls, in the three-legged dog printed on bottles, and in the stories people around the table continue telling thirty years later.
Before Dunham Cellars became one of Walla Walla’s early wineries, the building served as a World War II aircraft hangar where crews trained on B-17s and B-24s. Today, the room holds something very different: wine, old friendships, family history, and the people who kept showing up after loss changed everything.
When Eric Came Home
Eric's stepmom, JoAnn Dunham, grew up outside Walla Walla in a farming family. Wheat. Alfalfa. Cattle. Open land and long days of work. Wine was never part of the plan.
Eric changed that.
After serving in the Navy, he came home with a growing fascination for wine and decided he wanted to learn how to make it. He started at the bottom—working harvest, cleaning tanks, learning cellar work at L’Ecole No. 41 under Marty Clubb. Five years later, he had worked his way to assistant winemaker.
At the time, JoAnn and Mike were living in Seattle, running an insurance business and building a stable life. Then Eric came to them with the idea of starting a winery.
JoAnn still laughs softly when she talks about it because there was never some grand strategy behind the decision. “You just kind of keep doing what you’re doing,” she said. “And then one day you stop and look back and think… my God. Where did all that happen?”
The first vintages were tiny. Bottles were filled by hand. Labels were applied by hand. Corks were pushed in one at a time. They waxed bottles themselves because they didn’t own proper equipment yet.
Everyone had a role. Mike handled the finances. JoAnn handled facilities and operations. Eric made the wine. And slowly, over time, the little winery inside the hangar became part of Walla Walla’s early wine story.
The former airplane hangar that became home to Dunham Cellars — a place where industry, art, wine, and community slowly intertwined.
The Dog, The Art, and the Life Behind the Labels
People still walk into Dunham asking for “the dog wine.”
Porter was a small dog Eric found badly injured while living in Prosser during his early cellar days. A larger dog had attacked him, and the injuries were severe enough that veterinarians believed the leg could not be saved. Eric paid for the surgery anyway.
For a while, Porter stayed with Mike and JoAnn while he healed. JoAnn remembers setting the little dog on the kitchen counter several times a day to care for the wound. “We fell in love with him,” she said.
When Eric eventually brought Porter home, the dog became part of everyday winery life. Visitors saw him stretched out near the entrance or wandering through the winery on three legs as though nothing had happened.
Years later, when Dunham decided to create a more approachable table wine, they needed a label.
Eric’s answer was simple: “Everybody likes my dog.”
Porter was never created to market a wine. He was simply part of the family.
The same is true of Eric’s artwork. Paintings that began casually among friends slowly became part of the winery’s identity. Today his art appears across the Lewis Vineyard series, appearing again vintage after vintage.
After Eric passed away, more paintings surfaced. Friends and family brought them back to the winery—works he had given away over the years that JoAnn never knew existed.
“There’s a lot of paintings out there,” she said quietly.
The Three Legged Red label honors Port, the beloved winery dog whose resilience and spirit became part of Dunham Cellars’ identity.
The People Who Stayed
Loss changes the atmosphere inside a winery.
You can feel it at Dunham because no one tries to pretend otherwise.
Mike passed away in 2013. Eric passed away that same year.
John Blair, General Manager at Dunham Cellars, had already been working alongside them before everything changed. He remembers how impossible that season felt—not only personally, but for everyone connected to the winery.
“There’s no blueprint,” he said. “You just become that much tighter and get through it together.”
The people around Dunham stayed.
The vineyard manager had already been farming their sites for decades. The cellar team understood Eric’s style. Relationships with growers remained intact. The continuity came from people who believed deeply in what Dunham already was.
That continuity matters in Walla Walla Valley.
The wine community here still carries a sense of shared investment in one another. John described it as “coopetition”—wineries competing while still helping each other improve.
You sense that generosity around Dunham too.
JoAnn talks openly about helping younger wineries get started, allowing small producers to use equipment while they find their footing. Several former cellar workers and assistant winemakers now run wineries of their own.
People here remember who helped them early on.
Thirty years after Eric first came home with the idea of making wine, Dunham Cellars still feels grounded in those original relationships—the family, the vineyards, the artwork, and the stories that continue to circulate around the table long after the glasses are empty.
The vineyards of Walla Walla at sunset, where memory and legacy still linger long after harvest.
"It’s the feeling that this place was built by people who cared deeply for one another—and by others who cared enough to keep carrying it forward."
May 14, 2026
From Vineyard to Inbox
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