Déjà vu all over again – A reintroduction to Yak Yak Wine Blog

I’ve been writing this blog coming up on four months now, and for reasons I’ll explain, it’s time for another bit of navel gazing and a reintroduction.  Back in January, I was contacted by Heather Caro of Yakima Magazine.   Heather asked if I’d be interested in contributing to the on-line version of the magazine where she is a writer and coordinator.  She liked my blog and Yakima Magazine was in the process of updating their on-line presence to include a few different blogs that meshed well with their magazine’s themes.

I was and am extremely flattered by this request and until they ask me to stop or rescind my password, I’ll be co-posting through their website which is hosted on the wordpress platform.  This, to me, is different than the other digital avenues I’ve been using to distribute this blog, my own domain (yakyakwine.com), blogger, winechatr, facebook, and as of a week or so ago, twitter.  Yakima Magazine has a pulp and ink version as well and as the son and grandson of printers, platemaker and pressman respectively, I am honored to be connected with a magazine where the ink still smells like turpentine and the typeface imprint is more than a collection of pixels.

Here’s the déjà vu part.  Here’s the déjà vu part.  My name is Chris, and my wife Barb and I relocated to the Yakima area in the summer of 2008.  We moved to the area from Decatur, Illinois, a city similar to Yakima in many aspects, size, agricultural based economy, and same relative distance to major metropolitan areas.  Puddle jumper airplanes were not new to us, except instead of flying around thunderheads, the obstacles are a little more stationary, like Mt. Rainier. The things that attracted us here versus the Midwest (I was on a job search at the time) were the gorgeous mountain scenery, the chance to explore a region of the country entirely new to us, and the wine.

Oh, the wine.   Barb and I were casual wine drinkers with a few favorites that we acquired by trial and error through trips to our grocery store (we were label shoppers primarily), Sam’s Club, the one or two liquor/wine outlets in town, some wine events, and occasional excursions to Chicago or St. Louis.   On our first trip to Yakima during the interview trip, we knew something was different here with respect to wines.  Different in all good ways.  Locally grown and produced wines were readily available at tasting rooms where, for the most part, free samples of almost universally quality wines were poured by friendly, knowledgeable servers.  Only later did we realize that many times the servers were also the grape growers, winery owners, winemakers, or some combination.  All of these people are part of a close-knit community I like to call the Yak.

We fell in love with many of the wines, expanded our palates in umpteen different directions, and became club members at way too many places to admit.  Over the course of the past almost two years, we’ve visited over 150 wineries in Eastern Washington with a few ventures to nearby regions in Woodinville, West Washington, and Willamette Valley, Oregon. Also, since we have the bug, we combine wine tasting with our family and holiday visits to other parts of the U.S. or wherever we happen to go.

Through the course of wandering around the interweb looking for info on wine and wineries in Washington, I stumbled upon winechatr.com and began reading wine blogs.  There are lots out there with new ones starting daily but I noticed a niche that maybe wasn’t filled and I developed an itch to write about Barb and my experiences discovering Washington Wine, particularly wines from our area in the Yakima Valley and the embedded and surrounding wine growing areas (AVA’s), the Rattlesnake Hills, Snipes Mountain, Red Mountain, Wahluke Slope, and Horse Heaven Hills.  We’ve traveled to the other Washington AVA’s, but the first I listed have become our home field, as it were, and based on my scanning through wine blogs written by folks not connected to the industry in any way, this seemed like a niche that hadn’t been written about much.

After starting the blog, and still reading lots of others from Washington, Oregon and beyond, I kind of set my own parameters for how I’d proceed.  I realized wine writing, whether on-line or through print, is looked at skeptically at times, and the credentials, methods, motives, and goals of the writer are many times important to readers.

My credentials are fairly thin but I’m developing as a wine writer and drinker.  It takes lots of practice; I recommend 2-3 glasses per day 5-6 days a week.  When I write about a wine or a winery it’s one that we’ve purchased based on the winery earning our business or been given the wine for some reason other than specifically for a wine review.  I don’t solicit samples of wine for review or rank them or give them scores on the blog but inherently there is some comparison.  I obviously belie my personal preferences in wine, tasting room atmosphere, and food choices, and I write about those that I like and would recommend to my friends.  My goal is to share my and Barb’s experiences relating to wine drinking and touring, and include our friends and family in the discussion. Wine isn’t our whole life, or our job, but it’s something we enjoy as a hobby.

I don’t have any specific targets other than an arbitrary challenge from my most fervent commenter, WAwineman, to blog about 100 different Washington wineries.

I’ll get there, but to me the pleasure in drinking and writing about wine is not about ranking or scoring wines and wineries or hitting a Century Club target.   It’s more about the people we meet on the trail, in the tasting rooms, in the vineyards, or at wine events, and the happy, relaxed mood wine adds to our downtime away from the grind of daily life.

People who know me in real life that read this are often astonished.  First, that I know how to write a coherent sentence, but mainly that I’m such a blabber mouth.  In person I tend to listen more than talk, and I welcome other on-line blabber mouths to join my conversation about wine.  By my rough math, on my current pace of writing about our favorite wines and wineries in Washington a couple of times per week, I’ve got enough material in our cellar to last 4-5 years.  Even then there seems to always be more favorites and more wine to explore and since I started by reading others opinions and favorites, I welcome others to share their favorites here or point me to other places where wine is being talked or written about.

As I often conclude, Cheers!