Kelsey Albro Itameri went through a winding road before becoming a full-fledged wine maker. As an overachiever, she worked in politics, reality TV, and the food and beverage industry. But by trusting the process and believing in her skills, she found her way back to her family’s land and built a brand from the ground up, Ita Wines. She joins Dr. Sylvia Morris and Dr. Angela Walker to share her strategies as a one-person business during a time when the wine industry is full of unexpected trends and demands. Kelsey also explores her low-intervention processes to produce high-quality wines deeply connected to the place and the land itself.
Music courtesy of Dealer’s Choice Sound Recordings, Inc.
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Unexpected Journey Of A Wine Maker With Kelsey Albro Itameri
Not Knowing Is A Gift
Our guest is giving us all the proof that the most unexpected roads can lead to the most extraordinary destinations.
That’s right, Kelsey Albro Itameri graduated from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and did what any reasonable Hoya overachiever does. She tried everything. Politics, reality TV, natural foods, bartending, and food and beverage direction in San Francisco.
Eventually she found her way back to her homeland of Washington State to her family’s land in the foothills of the Blue Mountains and to the thing she was truly meant to build.
In 2019, Kelsey founded Ita Wines making low intervention wines, and we’re going to learn what that is, that are deeply connected to place and to the land. Since her inaugural vintage, Ita has been named a winery to watch by Wine and Spirit. Kelsey was named one of the Wine Enthusiast Future 40 and her wines have earned 90%-plus ratings from some of the most respected publications in the world.
This is a story about trusting the winding road and what it means to plant yourself literally in something bigger than a job title and about what it takes to build a brand from the ground up when the industry wasn’t exactly designed with you in mind.
We are so glad you are here, Kelsey Itameri. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I feel all hyped up.
That’s you girl, that’s you.
Kelsey’s Journey From Foreign Service To Winemaker
We have to add if it doesn’t come by the end of this, we have actually tasted the wines and they are amazing. We’d love to know Georgia’s School of Foreign Service to winemaker. That’s quite a journey.
Georgetown. Remember Angela, we haven’t been drinking Ita wines yet.
That’s you, Silvia. Maybe not me.
Maybe we need some Ita wines.
Sorry, Georgetown School of Foreign Service to winemaker. We mentioned all of the parts of your journey and I’m sure there’s much more that you could share, but looking back what was the season of professional exploration like preparing this for you this moment in time?
I didn’t know exactly what I was doing or how long of a journey I was embarking on. One of the things I found is that sometimes not knowing is a gift. When I graduated from Georgetown, I thought my path would be one thing and then I moved back home to Seattle and I was a campaign manager for my father who was a port commissioner at the time, which was not what I had expected necessarily, but it was a good opportunity.
I moved to LA and worked in reality television. I will say that at each step in my journey, I really thought it was possible that it was the last step. That I could have stayed in Seattle and worked in politics or public relations or advocacy in some way there. That I could have stayed in Los Angeles and worked in reality television. I could have stayed in the Bay Area, but I didn’t know I was being pulled forward. I didn’t know I was being pulled forward. I often felt that I was getting zigzagged all over the place. Each juncture, there was an opportunity that I couldn’t resist. I felt like a dog sniffing the wind. You know, I’m just there hanging out and I was like, “I have to go after that.” I don’t know if I answered your question.
No, absolutely. It’s finding your way. It sounds like taking those opportunities that maybe pleased your senses or that you felt like were just right at the time.
Definitely.
If you’re from Seattle and certainly, I spent some time in Seattle at the University of Washington and politics. Yes, I trained at the University of Washington Harborview. Absolutely. Seattle on the Western coast of Washington state is very different from Eastern Washington. When I think of Walla Walla, I honestly think of Walla Walla onions and I think about apples. I don’t necessarily think about wine. How did you come to be in Walla Walla?
For the layperson out there, basic Washington state geography, we are split down the middle by the Cascade Mountains. That creates a rain shadow effect so that the rainy side is toward the Pacific Ocean. Seattle, Olympia, all of that is the wet side. On the other side of the Cascades, Eastern Washington is much drier and that’s where a lot of the agriculture, the Walla Walla sweet onions, apples and grapes are here.
What drew me to Walla Walla was I was not the first in my family to be drawn to Walla Walla. I grew up in Seattle and my mom’s a hometown Seattle girl. My parents met at the University of Washington. My dad was an Air Force brat, and so he moved something like sixteen times before he got to college. For him growing up, home was his grandparents’ dairy farm in upstate New York in the Finger Lakes region. That’s where he went every summer.
He met my mom and they started making babies, as you do. He was working for UPS at the time and got sent to Walla Walla for work. He hadn’t wasn’t super familiar with Washington and fell in love at that point and said, “This feels like home.” This feels to him like that small farm community that he grew up loving. Fast forward almost twenty years later, when I was in college, my parents started thinking really seriously about Walla Walla and started buying some land here.
In 2011, they purchased some farmland in the foothills of the Blue Mountains and I always have loved Walla Walla and Eastern Washington since I was a child. I still deeply love Seattle. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. There’s a lot of trees and a lot of clouds. Here, it’s the big sky and big horizons and I really love that. Actually, my husband and I got married on my parents’ property in 2014 and then I convinced him that we should move to rural Washington in 2016.
That was a sell, I would think.
I do still check in like, “Are we still okay? Are you good?”
Studying Hand Line Irrigation And Winemaking
Your first year on the farm had you moving hand line in somewhere I remember the story of alfalfa fields and working a harvest internship and that sounds like a humble entry point. How did you stay committed when the work was probably what most people would say unglamorous and tell us about that experience?
Moving hand line in the field was what I did for free rent at the farmhouse.
I’m sorry, Kelsey, what is hand line? When I wrote that, I was I had no idea what it is. What does that mean for those of us who are city people, city slickers?
Let’s talk about irrigation 101 here. A lot of folks are familiar, when you think of farms you can see even when you’re flying over farm country in an airplane and you see the big circles. Those are from something called a center pivot. You have an irrigation system that is a big long line of irrigation that goes around in a circle. That’s how you come back.
The aliens don’t make those circles when I’m flying over.
There’s a pump and a motor in the middle and then there’s a whole bunch of sprinkler heads basically hanging down from that big arm that goes around. That’s one way to irrigate a field. That’s the most expensive in terms of infrastructure. There’s a more old-school thing called a wheel line where it looks like it’s sprinklers on a big long line and it looks like big wagons.
Have you seen that?
I’ve seen that too.
It has a little motor on it and so it goes back and forth over the field this way. Least expensive in terms of infrastructure, but most expensive in terms of labor is hand line. You have 40 feet of irrigation pipe that’s like this big around that has a head on each end. Every morning, I would go out to the field, turn off the water, and pick up each 40-foot section individually, walk 14 paces, put it down over and over.
That’s what moving hand line is. Once you get strong enough, it becomes meditative, for sure, as anything might. Also, a really wonderful way to get to know a piece of land because you’re walking back and forth over it and so you know the water comes down this way. This is where the elk like to come. This is where it gets windy or whatever. You really get to know a piece of property and that’s what we wanted to do. I think when I first moved here I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a wine maker, but I knew I liked drinking wine.
I knew that I felt a real connection to my parents’ property. Something like moving the hand line was not easy, but I was willing to do it because I knew it was connected to something in the future, something that would be useful to me. Similarly, when I started my harvest internship, that was actually very difficult because I did not have an understanding of what I didn’t know.
I was someone who had worked in food and beverage in the Bay Area had gone up to Napa and Sonoma and done plenty of wine tasting and I’d been to a lot of wineries but in my mind it was grapes, something something, barrel, something something, bottle. It turns out something something is the hardest work, the most important, everything and so I just remember feeling that first harvest like I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing.
I’m a grownup, I’m a professional, I’m capable, and I was totally incapable because I don’t understand this process. It was also it was a small team, they were just like, “Go here, go here.” People who have been doing it their whole life, so there wasn’t this big like, “Here’s the big picture explanation.” And so it wasn’t until like a month and a half in that I was like, “This is the flow, the work flow.” that was a really big a full part.
Not like Lucy in the big vats stomping around crushing the grapes and then bottling that up, sounds like, if you’re old enough to remember Lucille Ball in that episode.
I send out gifs in all of my emails and I use that one quite frequently.
I love that. And when you talk about harvesting, that is literally going up to the grape plant and deciding which bunch of grapes to remove in order for it to be processed to become wine, correct?
Different regions address this differently, but here in Washington state it’s quite common for the vineyards to have separate ownership or same ownership but a little bit separate management. There are folks who are working in the vineyards all year round and managing that and then the winemakers are working with the vineyard manager to talk about farming decisions that will impact quality.
The person that grows the grapes may be different from the person that helps to decide which grapes to make which vintage?
Yes, so the way it works is you have like a contract with the vineyard. For me, I have certain blocks of a vineyard, sections, that I work with every single year. I have a block of Primitivo that I use for my Rosé and those are the same vines that I’m working with every single year, so I get to know that part of this larger vineyard. I get to work with that vineyard manager to talk about the style of wine that I want to make and then as the wine maker you decide when to pick.
Usually the vineyard crew that works there picks all of the grapes. Just as an interesting side note for people who don’t work in wine making. I just remember talking to my college roommate and being like, “I have to go out and pick grapes,” and she was like, “Don’t can’t you pick grapes all year round because grapes are in the grocery store all year round?” I was like, “No. It’s once a year that we pick wine grapes.” they’re usually ripe in the August, between August and October depending on on the varietal. It’s a one-time harvest season per year.
You’ve talked about you did your internship so if somebody wanted to do an internship it’s essentially during that time of year that you’re learning to do or to to harvest and pick the best grapes.
Exactly.
What are you doing the rest of the year?
During harvest is when the grapes are picked and when they are vinified. You are processing the grapes. For a red wine, you keep the grapes and the juice all together fermenting with yeast. Yeast is what eats the sugars in the grapes and converts it to alcohol which makes it wine for us. That can take about, depending on your style, 2 to 3 weeks of that maceration and every day, there’s a lot of work that goes into that and then you press the wine.
Does the yeast come naturally or do we add yeast? How does the yeast get there?
This is the thing about winemaking is like if you can dream it someone’s tried to do it. You can do it. There are certain winemakers who only use native yeast they call it that’s naturally present on the outside of the berries. Some folks use specific commercial yeast, like you do bread yeast and so those are all winemaking decisions and a yeast catalog is like 100 pages.
If you can dream something in winemaking, someone’s tried to do it. You can do it as well. Share on XA yeast catalog?
A yeast catalog. It’s a real thing. It’ll be like, “This yeast was isolated from the Dijon region of France in this year. It exhibits a bright strawberry aroma and it’s tolerant to X alcohol percentage,” etc. It’s a whole thing. Very brand-specific. The rest of the year, you have to maintain the wine in barrels, getting them ready for bottling and then also sell wine. It’s not a wine museum.
What Kelsey Learned At The Domaine Jean Chartron In France
You trained at the Domaine Jean Chartron in Burgundy, which is in France, which we know is serious credentialing. What did that experience in France unlock for you and how does it show up when you make wine now?
Yeah, so I went to Domaine Jean Chartron in Puligny-Montrachet which is mostly white wine, it’s almost all Chardonnay.
No oak? Sorry, that’s about all I know about white wine.
Lots of barrel fermentations. For me, it was really important to have that white wine-making experience. Making white wine is quite different in terms of technique and attention to detail, although attention to detail is important everywhere, but it’s just a very different process than white wine making. Walla Walla as a region, is much more known for its red wines and I’ve been passionate about white wines from the jump. I wanted even more experience with that from people who are known to be very good at it. That was very important to me. Also, knowing that eventually I want to grow my own grapes and be the person managing both the vineyard and the winery, which is not super common in Washington.
What about for women, too? I would think to do both.
Yeah, wine’s a dude’s game. I was very thankful that the place that I worked in Burgundy, it was a family-owned business, which was a lesson about how do you deal with a multi-generational family business. We could do a whole podcast about family business.
A Netflix series about it, yeah.
Exactly. This generation, it was a brother and sister who were running the operation and it was really because of their relationship with each other and the fact that the brother was a good person that it was the two of them. According to tradition, according to family practices, it would just be him.
Father to the son.
It was great to have a woman in leadership there. The assistant winemaker was also a woman and so it is starting to change. I do think that if you’re savvy, you can find people who are open to women and teaching women and giving women more agency than they’ve historically been given in this in this field.
If you are savvy, you can find people who are open to women, teaching women, and giving women more agency than they have historically been given in business. Share on XFounding Ita Wines With A Low Intervention Philosophy
You founded Ita in 2019 and you have this low-intervention philosophy. What does that mean to you and why did that approach feel non-negotiable, as you said from the start?
Yeah, so here at Ita, I focus entirely on the eastern side of the Walla Walla valley. It’s not flat. It has a slope on one side on the Eastern side that leads into the Blue Mountains. My parents’ property is on the eastern side of the valley in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. The name Ita actually means East in Finnish. I married a Finnish man so there there’s some connections there.
I knew that I wanted to source from as close to my parents’ property as possible. I feel this real sense of pure luck that I have access to property and I feel responsibility because it’s not it’s not an easy thing to come by. When we are at the place where financially, we can afford to plant on my parents’ property, I want that I know what grows well there, that I know what tastes good from what grows there.
In the meantime, I’m sourcing from as close to that farm as possible. In so doing, I’m also trying to make it so that when you taste the wine, you’re not tasting what I have to say about it. You’re tasting what those grapes actually taste like because winemaking is really very chemistry-based and you can make a wine taste the same every single year if you’ve had some of the bigger brands of wine where you know you’re going to have a Crawford Sauvignon Blanc, and it’s always going to taste the exact same, no matter the vintage, no matter anything else. That’s great. I drink that, that’s fine.
Part of winemaking is that it can be so reflective of the year and the place where those grapes are grown if you just get yourself out of the way. I want to listen to what these grapes have to say. That’s why I use low intervention techniques, so I don’t fiddle with the chemistry you can add acid and water. I don’t do any of that. I do native fermentations when I can. It is a little more labor-intensive and I also have two children since starting the winery. I don’t use as much of new barrels that would give a very oaky character to the wine. I just try and take a little bit of a backseat.
We hear the terms like biodynamic, we hear the terms organic and now I’m hearing low intervention. Can you help us understand what those terms mean when it comes to me pouring my glass of wine and why I should care about those words or not?
Sure, I think it’s really about what you like. At the end of the day, wine is part of the fabric of our lives. Is it a health food? No. It is an intoxicant. We know this.
The icosanoids and the antioxidants there are some benefits to that.
Absolutely, but you know it’s not like you’re getting enough fiber in the day if you have your glass. At the end of the day, in terms of like health consequences, there’s not going to be a huge difference between drinking wine that’s organically grown or not, although if you’re worried about those farming practices and what they do to the land, that’s certainly more of like a a moral compass to look at that.
For me, there aren’t very many organically farmed vineyards in Washington state, which is sad and something that I want to see more of. I do source almost exclusively from vineyards that have sustainable certifications. That is something to look at. If you care about farm worker health, if you care about environmental health, that’s definitely something to be looking for. Organic just has things that are on top of that, additional regulations, additional protocols. Biodynamics is a little more woo-woo if you want to put it that way. You do things based on the cycle of the moon and things like that.
I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.
Yeah, if you read into it you’re like, “This is a little a little heavy.”
That sounds complicated.
Yes. In terms of as a consumer, what you’re looking for, it really depends on what you like. One of the great things is you can find wines at any price point for any palate. One of the things I’ve learned, I went back to school at the community college here to study winemaking. I’ve become incredibly confident in buying wine for myself because it’s so difficult.
You can find wines at any price point for any palate. Share on XIt is. The labeling, the region, the twist-off versus the cork. There’s just so many things to consider.
I think it’s most important, find a wine or two that you like. Find a wine or two that you don’t like because if you go to a wine shop and you tell someone it’s almost better to be like, “I really don’t like this.” they’ll be like, “Okay. I’ll steer clear of that.” Also be like, “I’m going to spend $30 today.” Before, I’d be like, “I don’t know. A little bit in the middle.” be really upfront.
Important Questions To Ask During Wine Tasting
Here’s a question because Silvia can ask all the good questions. I am the give me sparkling, white, tad just a little sweet, but so probably more cheap. If I was to come to your location and I’m a connoisseur and I’ve already had the advantage of tasting some of your wines so I know that they’re super good, but what are the questions that I want to ask when I’m trying to ascertain you know is this a good one for me or not?
It all depends on what good for you means. Sometimes a customer says, “I want your best wine.” I’m like, “Oh.”
It’s all the best.
Right, because it’s so subjective. I think if you are going to a winery and you have the benefit of tasting every single wine and so you get to decide for yourself what the right wine is for you. There’s really nothing I can say. Sure, it helps if you like some of those specific things, if it makes you feel better about the wine.
A lot of the questions that I get are about what would you pair this with? How long should I keep this in my cellar? Things like that. What’s the serving temperature? Stuff like that. Those are all great questions to ask when you’re at a winery. Also, if farming practices and things like that are important to you it’s a great way to learn about that. Also, if you’re very curious about wine and how it works, especially if you’re at a place where the winemaker’s there, that’s all we want to talk about.
This is an off-the-cuff question. Lunch time will be soon. If we’re going to have a little glass of wine with our lunch, let’s say we’re going to have a salad with a little bit of protein, maybe some bread, a little cheese to wind up the meal, what would we drink with you right now?
Stay with me right now, I would drink rosé.
You’re speaking her language.
To me, there’s something about rosé that’s very approachable. It doesn’t have to be a serious occasion. Maybe it’s just because it’s pink, it feels fun. In a more technical way, rosé is such a beautiful wine because it’s a versatile wine. It’s bright and has fresh acidity, so that makes it really great to pair with all kinds of different foods. It also does have a little bit of tannin, so it will stand up to whatever protein is in your salad and it will be a nice pairing. To me, it feels like sparkling wine and rosé feel very appropriate to me to drink during the day.
Thank you. Those are our go-tos.
Navigating The Difficulties Of Wine Business
What’s the hardest business lesson you’ve learned since founding Ita?
I’ve learned so many. I think that wine is a difficult business. When we get down to business, all lunch wine aside, it’s difficult because it takes a lot of money to produce wine, it takes money to store wine until it can be sold, and then it takes time to sell. Especially as a brand-new brand, that can be very difficult. As I’m almost entirely a one-person business, when you’re founding and you’re creating a brand, you don’t know what’s special about it because you just made it.
You’ve barely had the chance to taste your finished product. I remember the first year or two being really intensively figuring out, “What’s my elevator pitch? What is special about the wines that I’m making?” it wasn’t even until 2025 that I boiled it down to like, “These are low-intervention wines.” SEO worked too, finally, like, “These are woman-made wines.” Think about what I’m offering to the public. Also, because there is a level of artistry to it, to be confident. It’s quite different from most of the wines here in Walla Walla. There were instances where I had consumers who were older and felt strongly that opinion was fact, that would tell me that they didn’t think that I was doing it the right way.
Bless their hearts.
It’s very hard because I put so much of myself into this. To get that thick skin to say, “Yes, I’m doing something different. I’m doing it on purpose. It’s okay if you don’t like it. There are plenty of people who love wines that don’t necessarily like the types of wines that this male customer liked.” Getting that thick skin and really understanding what you make and how it’s different, that took a long time. Obviously, cash flow’s tough and all those things, all those small business things, they do take time to become part of you and become your routine.
What Keeps Kelsey Moving Forward
What keeps you going, as far as you get up every day, you are a sole proprietor? This is a new venture, Ita Wines, or new-ish. How do you keep going?
I had a little bit of a like mama bear awakening, I want to say. The wine industry is in a little bit of an interesting juxtaposition with the transfer. Baby Boomers had really driven what was demanded from wine and wine demand for a long time. Now folks are aging out of the consumption era of their life, and there’s a new generation of wine consumers that are coming on board, and it’s making the waters a little choppy in this business. Let’s put it that way.
People are aging out of the consumption era of their lives. There is a new generation of wine consumers coming on board, which makes the waters a little choppy in this business. Share on XWalla Walla, we’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s difficult to get here. For a long time, it was enough for someone to just open the door to their tasting room and they would sell 1,000 cases out the door without even trying. That’s how it used to be here. I had just had my second child. I was looking around, I was like, “I can’t just sit around in my winery waiting for people to come. I need to find where they are.” also, I can’t give up. I have several years of wine to sell.
I remember just being like, “No one’s going to save you and you need to go to where people are. You can’t just sit here in Walla Walla in the middle of nowhere and expect someone else to solve your problems.” I was like, “All right, LFG. We got to get online, we got to go out of the bubble, we need to talk to different people, we need to meet people where they are and really make wine less scary.” Wine can make people feel bad sometimes that they don’t know what to order or whatever. Anyway, that’s what keeps me going.
I like the “LFG.” I see all of that when we met you. I appreciate the authenticity, as you mentioned, you feel like that artistry of a someone that’s doing it maybe a little bit different on a smaller scale, but clearly with passion. I think that is probably the definition of somebody that’s going to be an entrepreneur that can withstand sometimes doing it outside the box but still believing in what they’re doing.
What Kelsey Would Say To Her Younger Self
Even though the dream’s still there, the journey may change, but you still have the same dream, so you’ve got to figure it out. I definitely saw that in what you’re doing and definitely tasted it. It was very good wine. I appreciate all of that. Let’s say you could talk to your 22-year-old self again, and you’re fresh out of Georgetown, you haven’t done any of this stuff, you’re trying to figure it all out. What’s the one thing you would tell her or the few things?
Sure, of course, a few things. In a certain way, I would tell myself that none of it is really that serious. There were bumps in the road in my career, bad bosses, coworkers, difficult situations that really at that time felt like the end of the world for me. I barely remember them now. I remember one tiny piece of them. You can give so much of yourself and your energy to people who aren’t paying you for that. They’re paying you for your work. They are not paying you for your mental space outside of work. Protect yourself a little more, and also to of course, we all get tougher as we get older. I wish I could lend a little bit of my tougher skin to my younger self.
Your customers are paying you for your work, not for your mental space outside of work. Protect yourself a little more. Share on XIf we could all lend that, that would be nice.
What Kelsey’s Self-Care Routine Looks Like
Kelsey, you are a winemaker, you’re a mother, you’re a wife, you’re a daughter, an entrepreneur. What does your self-care practice look like and, if it isn’t exactly where you’d like for it to be, how do you envision it and then how do you protect that time?
Yeah, this was one, I won’t say that I was stressing about it. I was like, “This is a great question,” because it is so difficult to find the time. I have become a very sporadic meditator. I do the guided meditations on my Calm app, which I like.
Yeah, me too.
We’re Jay Shetty fans.
I did one this morning because I was thinking about self-care. When I’m not doing it more than even once a week, I find that it allows me to find the moments of enjoyment, to be able to enjoy a beautiful view on my drive to work, a cup of coffee things that really are nothing more than a source of joy in my life. That’s been really great. As a mother too, I’m like, “You know what’s awesome? Taking a shower with no kids in the shower with me.”
Tell me about it. It’s the best. It’s all relative.
Yes. Life adjusts, I’m sure. In a couple years, I’ll have a different self-care.
It does. Savor those moments. Yes, I remember those so well.
Kelsey, this conversation has been such a gift. The way you talk about your work, the wine, the land, it’s all one thing for you. I think that’s exactly what a true Boss Leap looks like. It’s not just a career move, it’s an entire life decision.
As I mentioned, we are rooting so hard for Ita Wines and for you and for everything that you’re building. For our readers who want to follow your journey, find your wines, and just be in your world, where can they find you?
You can find our current releases on the website, ItaWinery.com, on Instagram, we’re @ItaWinery as well.
Kelsey, do you ship to all fifty states? How do we find out where we can buy your wine?
I can ship to a lot of states. It’s a little bit of a patchwork. Some states are tougher than others, like Maryland is notoriously difficult, but Virginia is easy. I do have a list on my website. Actually, I need to make my FAQ section a little more robust and find that a little more easily. I can ship to most states in the US. It’s springtime, so it’s not too hot to ship wine. Wine’s something you don’t want to cook when it’s 100 degrees on its way to Georgia.
I’d better order mine before it gets hotter. Exactly.
Thinking the same.
Boss Leap audience, please go and find Ita Winery. Go and find Kelsey Albro Itameri and, honestly, go find a bottle of Ita. That is your homework. We can all get behind that right now.
I think that’s the best homework we’ve ever assigned on this show.
It absolutely is. Kelsey, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story so openly with our Boss Leap community.
To everyone reading, thank you for spending this time with us. If this conversation moved you, inspired you, or gave you a little nudge you needed, share this episode with a woman in your life who’s ready to take a Boss Leap.
Thank you both so much.
Thank you. Until we meet again, may you be well.
May you be well.
Important Links
About Kelsey Albro Itameri
Kelsey Albro Itämeri came to winemaking via a long and winding road. After graduating from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 2009, she did a good bit of professional dabbling: politics, reality TV and film, natural foods, and as a bartender and food & beverage director in San Francisco.
Ready to settle down, Kelsey looked to her homeland of Washington State and moved to Walla Walla, where her family had purchased land in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. The first year on the farm was spent moving handline in alfalfa fields, caring for a test plot of grapevines, and working as a harvest intern at Balboa Winery.
Kelsey then enrolled in Walla Walla Community College’s Institute for Enology & Viticulture and interned at The Walls Vineyards in Walla Walla and at Domaine Jean Chartron in Puligny-Montrachet in Burgundy, France. She came away with a deep appreciation for site-specific vineyard management and winemaking.
In 2019, Kelsey founded itä wines, making low-intervention wines with grapes from the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Since the release of her inaugural vintage, itä has been named a “Winery to Watch” by Wine & Spirits and Kelsey was named one of Wine Enthusiast’s “Future 40” and her wines have garnered many 90+ ratings from publications such as Decanter, Wine Enthusiast, Jeb Dunnuck, International Wine Report, Northwest Wine Report, and Wine & Spirits.