Paul Beveridge took a buyout from Heller and ploughed the money straight into the ground. The payoff will come with the next vintage. Ross Todd reports

When Paul Beveridge, a partner at Heller Ehrman, took a buyout from the firm in autumn 2007, there was no doubt where he would invest the proceeds. Beveridge is a Washington State winemaker who, until that time, bought fruit from vineyards across the state. The buyout helped him fulfil the dream of owning a place to grow his own grapes.

Luckily for Beveridge, his vines have outlived his old firm. His vineyard now sits on a plateau just outside of Washington's Yakima Valley, two-and-a-half hours east of his Seattle home. But Seattle this is not. The site is sunny more than 300 days per year and averages only 15 inches of annual precipitation. "It'll make a nice tax-deductible vacation home if the business tanks," Beveridge jokes.

He planted about 10 of the 85 acres with 22 grape varieties from Italy, France and Portugal. Beveridge is finding out which varieties perform best, picking yeast strains to pair with each pressing during fermentation, and deciding what type of barrel to age them in. Even now, almost two years after the first vines were planted, he gets poetic as he reels off minutiae about the vineyard. "It's got these big pillows of volcanic bedrock with depressions filled with loess – that comes from the German word for windblown soil," he says breathlessly. The vineyard's sun exposure is east and southeast, "like Burgundy," he says.

The echo of a premier French wine region delights Beveridge. His first foray into winemaking came in the late 1980s, when he made French-style reds in the cellar of Madrona Bistro, a restaurant in Seattle where his wife was the chef. Then just an associate at Heller, Beveridge took inspiration from a partner who had a four-barrel home winemaking setup.

"I figured if he's a senior partner and he's got time to have four barrels in his garage, I should have at least one," he says.

The restaurant closed in 1994. By then, Beveridge was a partner at Heller, specialising in environmental law. He and his father-in-law continued making the house wine, pressing Washington grapes into small vintages under the Wilridge label. The winery has grown, and now produces about 1,500 cases of wine a year that range from $16 (£10) for a bottle of Pinot Grigio to $29 (£18)  for one of the label's reds.

With the wine business falling off about 30% from a year ago, Beveridge has continued to spend about a quarter of his time practising law to pay the bills. "If I had known it could work like this, I would have left 15 years ago," he says. (He was at Heller for 22 years.) As a solo practition