Pierce County winery closes tasting room amid increased costs and fewer visitors
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Two Fox Winery closed its Lakebay tasting room, citing personal and business reasons.
- Owners will retain license to sell wine and may start a members club.
- Economic pressures, rising costs and hurdles with the county contributed to the closure.
The Two Fox Winery in Lakebay has closed its tasting room indefinitely, according to announcements on the business’s Facebook page.
“It’s been a whirlwind of activity and emotion,” the business posted on Facebook in early December, ahead of their last day Dec. 13. “We’d love to say goodbye and thank you for your patronage over the years.”
Two Fox Winery welcomed guests to their tasting room, a 1,400-square-foot cottage on 15 acres of forested land, beginning in 2022, The News Tribune reported. Kyle and Tedra Hett discovered the property at 17812 18th St. when it was previously Trillium Creek Winery, owned by a couple in their 70s who were looking to retire, per The News Tribune’s reporting.
When all was said and done, the property included a “tasting room, underground wine den, two small vineyards, quarter acre flower farm” and the Hetts’ private home, according to their website. RV campers could park themselves in a spot reserved for members of Harvest Hosts, a network of farms, wineries and other overnight host sites for RV travelers across the country.
In a phone call Dec. 15, Tedra Hett said that the stress of running the winery was getting to be too much.
“It’s just, you kind of reach a point where we work at hospitals, we’re stressed enough at as it is at our day job, and this was supposed to be our outlet, which has now become more stressful, and it was just time to let that go,” Hett said.
The couple will retain their business and winery license so they still have the opportunity to sell the wine in barrels they have remaining, and can potentially set up a members-only wine club, she said. Interested customers can stay up-to-date by subscribing to the winery’s email newsletter through their website.
“But it was time,” she said. “It was time to focus our attention more on how we want to live our lives and not try to essentially have people over to our house every weekend all year long.”
Winery faced rising costs, difficult regulations
Tedra Hett explained that a number of economic factors contributed to the end of the tasting room.
For one thing, the alcohol industry is seeing a downturn, she said. Gallup data this year confirms that fewer Americans are drinking than before. The winery saw the number of visitors stagnating, which Tedra Hett attributed in part to their out-of-the-way location on the Key Peninsula and the proliferation of wineries and wine bars in Gig Harbor.
Meanwhile, costs have continued to rise, for “glasses, corks, labels, basically everything,” she said. The winery saw the cost of their insurance double from one year to the next, according to Tedra Hett.
“And you can try to budget and save and plan ahead for those things, but ultimately, when they give you that final amount and your insurance is due in two days, you’re kind of stuck, and you have to just do something and pay for it,” she said.
The winery had wanted to keep their price points low so that locals could afford to visit regularly. It got to the point where the Hetts weren’t able to pay themselves, she said.
There were also hurdles the winery had to overcome due to Pierce County regulations. Because the winery lacked a certain grade well system, the county didn’t allow the business to wash their own glassware. Two Fox Winery worked around that by buying their own logos and wine glasses to include with each customer’s purchase, but that was an extra cost, Tedra Hett said.
Upgrading their well system would have required them to pay several hundred dollars a month to get it tested, and “that’s not feasible when you’re already operating at such a small scale,” she said.
The county also limited the winery to having “six seats” in the tasting room at a time, which made it difficult for Two Fox Winery to fulfill their vision of letting visitors relax at the property for longer periods of time, she said.
Couple still exploring wine production, wine club
The Hetts are leaving their options open, Tedra Hett said. They’re open to continuing production of small batches of wine and selling it to participants in a wine club with a couple releases each year, she said.
Meanwhile, she’s taken on more responsibilities and hours at her current job as a pharmacist, and she’ll continue selling flowers that she’s growing at the property, she said. She and her husband, who works as a nurse, hope to get back into traveling more, she said.
“I know it sounds like a little bit of a downer of a conversation, but I’m very proud of what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished and what we’ve created,” Tedra Hett told The News Tribune. “It is bittersweet and it is disappointing for us, as well as a lot of people, but it’s the right choice for us right now. ... This is one chapter closing, but it’s not the end of the book, so we’ll see where we go from here.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2025 at 10:28 AM.
