Drew Bledsoe is committed to excellence. During a long career as one of the country’s most prominent football players, the Pacific Northwest native quarterbacked in the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl, and achieved myriad other accolades.

Since retiring to Bend in 2007, Bledsoe has strived to achieve the same level of distinction with his wines — notably Doubleback, and more recently Bledsoe Family Wines.

“Doubleback cabernet has always been the main focus of our business,” he said of his standard bearer. “We want to make that one singular wine as great as we can make it.”

But a high-end cabernet sauvignon doesn’t come cheap. The retail on a 2013 Doubleback cab is about $105. So in an effort to reach out to a broader market, he and his wife, Maura Healy Bledsoe, have established a second line, Bledsoe Family Wines, offering several wines for half that price and less.

“I am my own target demographic,” Bledsoe said. “I am a wine lover who has a little money and who wants to experiment.

“But don’t confuse me. Give me the wine that is your very best. And that’s what Doubleback is.

Three wines, forever and ever, amen. The cabernet, an estate reserve and a chardonnay. Anything else will go under the Bledsoe Family Wines label.”

Fear and passion

The former Washington State University star, who played 14 years in the National Football League for New England, Buffalo and Dallas, said he began exploring the wine business in 2003 with “a combination of passion and fear.”

“The fear part came from watching the disastrous results of professional athletes when they retire,” Bledsoe said. “So many guys have financial distress, marital distress, substance abuse, all these things that really scared me moving onto the next stage of life.

“If you’re really fortunate, as I was, you get to play into your mid-30s. I was so fortunate to have two great parents.

“The best advice they gave me, as I was getting into the college scene and move into the pro scene, was to make sure I didn’t get my identity and self-worth tied up in how many touchdowns I threw and how many games we won. I’ve lived a very blessed and privileged life, and when I say that, I don’t even add football into that situation.

“The passion part of the story is opposite. My wife and I had a shared passion for wine. The more I learned about it, the more I discovered how much more there was to know. Add into that, while I was playing football, my hometown of Walla Walla started producing some of the greatest wines in the world. I was able to go back to my hometown to start a business.”

Only the best

Bledsoe had attended middle school and high school in Walla Walla with Chris Figgins, who was becoming a great winemaker about the same time Drew was emerging as a football star. “He was our first draft choice,” Bledsoe now likes to say. “Chris was our consulting winemaker for the first seven years of our business. It was sort of like cheating.”

Figgins had earned his reputation at Leonetti Cellar, founded by his own father, Gary Figgins. “From the very start of our business,” Bledsoe said, “we took a very long-term view. We bought the first piece of ground in 2003 and started the first vintage of Doubleback in 2007. We planted our own vineyards and focused on quality from (the) very start.”

Family wines

In 2013, Figgins passed the Doubleback torch to his protégé, Josh McDaniels, who had assisted with production since the original 2007 vintage. “It was a transition we had always planned for,” Bledsoe said. Figgins had begun focusing on other ventures, including Figgins Family Wine Estates and pinot noir vineyards in Oregon.

Now working with McDaniels, Bledsoe considered the selection of grapes chosen for blending in the Doubleback cabernet sauvignon. “There’s always a certain amount of wine that doesn’t make the blend,” he said. “Every year, we’d bring some home. It’s really good wine that turned into our family wine, what we drink around the table.”

The first Bledsoe Family Wines — a rosé ($32), chardonnay ($38), cabernet-dominant red blend ($44), syrah ($52) and the Flying B cabernet ($48) — were released earlier this year.

“We wanted to be able to produce wines at a price point that is accessible to more people,” Bledsoe said. “While we’re really proud of Doubleback, and the price reflects that, most people are not going to spend that amount of money most nights.”

New identity

When all is said and done, though, the quarterback is all about the Doubleback.

“As Maura and I started to experience more wines from around the world,” he said, “we started to pursue wines that had more elegance and balance, rather than the very big, overripe cabernet. We liked Old World-style cabernets with more balance.”

Their first estate vineyard site was in the SeVein development near Milton-Freewater, on the Oregon border just south of Walla Walla. Grapes grown in this area, just above The Rocks American Viticulture Area, are unique, Bledsoe said: “windblown loess soil, light and very porous, over the top of fractured basalt, so vines have to work really hard to dig down into the basalt. Plus, the south side of the (Walla Walla) Valley is hotter and drier than north side. It makes prettier, more feminine, more floral wines, and that’s really what we wanted to make.”

By next spring, Doubleback will formally establish an identity separate from Bledsoe Family Wines. The higher-end wines will be poured for tastings by appointment only at a new, state-of-the-art winery in south Walla Walla. Bledsoe Family Wines will continue to be offered at a tasting room on Main Street in downtown Walla Walla.

The location of the new winery is the original Flying B Ranch, once owned by Drew’s great-grandfather, Stuart Bledsoe. A new building has been modeled after a century-old barn in the heart of the Flying B estate vineyard on Powerline Road.

Selected wines are also available at some Bend restaurants as well as at The Loft, the Bledsoes’ private-membership wine club on Bond Street.

— John Gottberg Anderson can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.