Steve Thomson
President 

Steve has 35 years of wine industry experience, following a successful 12-year career as a Restaurateur and Hotel Industry Food & Beverage Director and an 8-year career as fine wine wholesaler in the Midwest.  Steve is the current CEO of Oregon's Cristom Vineyards. He first met his wife Karen at a wine event in 1992 and in 1995 they were married at Cain Vineyard & Winery in the Napa Valley. Wine was always at the family table, and the family visited Napa and Sonoma wineries regularly. Kevin had an opportunity to get involved early on, cleaning tanks at Frog's Leap Winery when he was just 12. 

 

Steve first discovered Walla Walla in 2004 while leading the development of the NxNW brand for King Estate Winery where he was serving as EVP at the time. He quickly fell in love with Walla Walla, and the people who were putting the Walla Walla region on the global wine map. In 2006 Steve jumped at the opportunity to join a group of its wine industry leaders to found the 'Octave' Vineyard.

 
A native of the Chicago area and graduate of the University of Illinois, Steve has also studied at Wharton, The Harvard Kennedy School of Government, UC Davis, and has served as a senior advisor for Scion Advisors, a top wine-industry consulting firm. He also has a winemaking certificate from UC Davis.

Appointed by the Governor of Oregon to the Oregon Wine Board in 2012, Steve served as Chairman of the Oregon Wine Board, and President of the Oregon Winegrowers Association in 2017. He currently serves as Secretary of the Board of the Northwest Wine Coalition, based in Seattle. 

Steve has a deep interest in Trade Regulation and in 2011 represented the US Wine Industry in testimony before the US Senate Finance Committee on the topic of global competitiveness. In 2013 he was appointed by Oregon’s Governor to represent the Oregon wine industry on the Governor’s Task Force for alcohol privatization. In 2013 Steve successfully petitioned the US Treasury Department’s TTB, for the first and only extension of Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the AVA’s 40-year history. Thomson has been a speaker or panelist at global wine events such as Vinexpo Asia-Pacific (Tokyo, 2002), Vinexpo Europe (Bordeaux, 2003), The London Wine Trade Fair (2008), VinItaly (2011), Prowein Europe (2013), and Prowein Asia (Shanghai, 2014) as well as the WSWA’s Council for Leadership Development in 2009 and 2015.
 
For all of his industry experience, Steve is most drawn to the simple connection grape farming has with the generations of farmers in his family who came before.  It is a romantic notion, coupled with a belief that the true testament of a wine's worth is how its provenance, quality, and story, brings people together at the dinner table with good food and friendship.