Princess and Bear Wines brings small-batch wines from France exclusively to Seattle

You could say Carol Bailey-Medwell and Steve Medwell are hands-on when it comes to their business, Princess and Bear Wines.

They recently opened a tasting room in Seattle's South Park neighborhood, but the real work started years ago when they retired part-time to a small village in France.

"We started drinking this absolutely great wine that was really reasonably priced, and we thought to ourselves, 'There's nothing like this available,'" said Medwell.

Today, both are upside-down excited about their vino. They import over 100 different small-batches of wine from tiny producers in an unspoiled region in the south of France, and you can only get this wine in Seattle.

"Many of our wines are from one single vineyard, all of the wine comes from one vineyard," said Bailey-Medwell. "Our wines have lots of personality because they come from single vineyards."

And many of the wines are produced only by women from small villages. It's an opportunity the hard-working women never saw coming — until Bailey-Medwell and Medwell showed up. These two, jokingly, say they can tell if a woman produced the wine.

"The way that they make the wine [...] the women just tend to extract from the red wines in a softer way, and they just have a lovely, kind of luscious feminine way about them," said Bailey-Medwell.

The women hand-harvest the grapes and also have a hand in the marketing department. Bailey-Medwell and Medwell aren't just buyers — they're also believers, even helping out the women winemakers in the field.

"When we see the wines here in our tasting room, we tell people, 'This wine is made by a female winemaker,'" said Bailey-Medwell. "We literally pinch ourselves that we know these people and we've walked in their vineyards."

See more from Gaard Swanson on Seattle Refined, airing weekdays at 3 p.m. on KOMO-TV