THE CAST & PROLOGUE

🎵Your wines locked up in a PDX basement🎵

Denouement Wine Co. is the offspring of a fun-loving bootleg operation formally known as Tacksacker Cellars. It started with two friends (Kyle Busacker and Matt Tackett) scoring 500 lbs. of Cab Franc for the 2017 vintage from Matt's colleague Peter Bouman. As is often the case, winemaking begets more winemaking and within a couple years they were trying their hand at everything from Burgundian style Pinots to a partial whole cluster, skin contact Albariño. Ahh, Amberiño, what a strange beautiful beast you were. Alas the only constant in life is change and when Kyle and his family moved to Massachusetts in 2020 the Tacksacker chapter of our story ended.

Matt and his wife Amy picked up the threads, jumped through the kafkaesque licensing requirements and thus Denouement Wine Co. was born. Today Denouement Wines are made by Matt at Celestial Hill Winery in Carlton, OR, owned by Chris and Mellisa Thomas. The 2021 and 2022 vintages were crafted under the watchful eye of Oregon winemaker legend Jay Sommers. In 2023 winemaker and rising star, Alisa Le, took the job overseeing production at Celestial Hill. She has been kind enough to give Matt advice and guidance, even when he comes up with outlandish ideas usually involving skin contact white wines or other obscure winemaking methods.

Denouement Wine Co.
Fall into Place

Denouement wines are vintage and terroir driven vineyard designate bottlings. Our goal is to highlight the nuances of each vineyard and the variability between growing seasons. The Willamette Valley and Columbia River Gorge offer an amazingly diverse array of climates and soil profiles. We allow the wines to reveal their origin through slow native fermentation whenever possible, long cold soaks and extended post-fermentation maceration. The red wines are aged in french oak barrels ranging from new to neutral, the whites are the same with some partially processed in stainless steel and the rosé is fermented in almost all stainless steel with a neutral barrel used here and there.

These wines are meant to be drank with friends and loved ones, to inspire conversation and spark unique schemes and dreams. They can be carpe diem wines, c'est la vie wines, vaya con Dios wines and lets-get-this-party-started wines.

The artwork on the labels are all paintings or mixed media drawings done by Matt. More if his work can be found here.