Our Story
Split Rail winery is propagated by the minds of a new generation of drinker. We create wine that is spawned from whimsy and redolent of the soil that we all stand upon. Our winery emerged from a fervent belief in supporting regional agriculture, creating Idaho-centric products, exploring new wines and wine styles, and an unfettered love for drinking, eating and debauchery. Let us bring the farm to your glass; bring Northwest soil to your lips.
We are a small-production winery that hand-makes all of our wine from fruit sourced from vineyards in the Pacific Northwest. Our goal is to seek the best fruit possible to make the style of wines we love to drink. We practice minimal intervention winemaking to highlight our fruit, and we love to explore unconventional aging and production techniques to create plonk that is both exciting and distinctive. We invite you to consume either with or without us…
“Split Rail wines surf the cataclysmic variable of space and vine. ”
Our Focus
We have a core focus on Rhône varietals and it’s our goal to never make the same wine twice. Exploring new production techniques and tweaking traditional winemaking practices keeps us relevant. We believe in what we release and we want your palate to be as intrigued as our minds. The world evolves, so let’s evolve together. Dig?
Shop Now
The Folks
Jed Glavin and Laura Hefner-Glavin are the founders of Split Rail Winery. We began our wine exploits by pairing mediocre wines with cheap food during our impoverished years together at college. As we charged through the years, our dedication to exploring new foods married beautifully with an interest in wine, and hence, winemaking. Tasting new grape varietals and learning about the history and evolution of wine-making became an obsession. Now, we get to share the toils of our passion with our two beautiful children Eloise and Boone.
Jed Glavin is the fractured mind behind Split Rail wines. He learned the process of winemaking in the confines of his garage and through years of making expensive mistakes. Fermenting grapes from Walla Walla struck a chord of intrigue that blossomed into a hard-core passion project. He loves 80’s revival and techno-pop music, synthesizers, he often dreams of mountaineering, thinks incessantly about global travel, is a skiing philanthropist, reads the occasional beatnik poem, and is an accomplished assailant of everything weird. His favorite wine is beer.
Winemaking is not a one-man show and if you’re doing it alone at a reasonable scale, you should be worried. Split Rail has a great assemblage of cellar hands and sales staff that deserve as much or more glory as the OG’s themselves. Let’s give a round of applause to the peeps doing the heavy sh*t in the background that help make all the parts come together. Here, here.
“Our wine is medicine to cure your heartache. Or lack thereof...”
”Find your eternal ray of liquid sunshine.”
The Fence
The Split Rail fence stands as a philosophical margin of the west. It defines the desert landscape that radiates behind it. Our wines arose from the soil and conviction of these landscapes.
Dedicating our wine to the fence allows us to make the desert landscapes of the west drinkable. It is our goal to make everything drinkable in a sentient sort of way. So, jump aboard and ride this fence into the great unknown..
“Wine with enough hip to do the humpty. ”
