Christopher Michael

The name is the two brothers: Eric Christopher Harms and Ryan Michael Harms. In 2009, Ryan was four years into building Union Wine Company in Oregon; Eric was working on the finance side of the wine business in California; and after years of long-distance phone calls about eventually doing something together, they finally did. Christopher Michael became that project — two middle names on one label — years before Eric formally joined Union in 2016 as its finance director. The brothers had been scheming together since childhood in Holland, Michigan, and this is the wine that made the partnership official long before it became a job.

The founding premise is simple, and a little contrarian in a corner of the wine world where appellation loyalty runs deep: geographic boundaries shouldn’t define the wines. Christopher Michael works from a Willamette Valley home base but sources wherever a variety grows best on either side of the Columbia — Pinot Gris drawn from the Willamette Valley, Eola-Amity Hills, and Umpqua Valley; Chardonnay from Wahluke Slope, Horse Heaven Hills, and the broader Columbia Valley; Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah from Washington’s warm eastern reaches. It is a négociant model in the honest sense of the word — assembled with a winemaker’s judgment rather than a marketer’s map.

The winemaking, handled at Union’s Tualatin winery by Meredith McGough’s team, keeps its hands light and its intentions clear. The Pinot Gris sees all stainless steel; the Chardonnay takes only around fifteen percent French oak; the reds lean plush and fresh rather than extracted. The result, in both bottle and can, is exactly what a good glass poured without ceremony should be: vivid fruit, real freshness, nothing in the way.

For Ryan Harms, whose career was built on Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, Christopher Michael is also the label where he gets to stretch — Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah, the big reds Oregon rarely lets him make. That spirit of range runs through the whole project: these are the wines the brothers make the way they would order them — generous, precise, fairly priced — from a corner of the wine world they know down to the vineyard row. Two middle names, two states, one family.