The Source – Columbia Winery 2004 Otis Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon – Yakima Valley

When you sign up on blogger.com to create a blogger profile, you have the option of listing favorite hobbies, music, movies, and books.  If you click on my profile, you’ll see that one of my favorite books is The Source by James Michener.   Michener, if you don’t know, was a writer of historical fiction whose works include Hawaii, Poland, Chesapeake, Texas, and Tales of the South Pacific.  Michener’s big books, and many of them are very long, begin at the dawn of time for a civilization or region of the world and follow a group of families or community through generation after generation, century after century.  They are long books.

If Michener had written a book about Washington and the Pacific Northwest, the Missoula Floods, the Yakama and other native peoples, the volcanoes of the Cascade Range, and Lewis and Clark would likely have played prominent roles.  Into the twentieth century, in addition to Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks, there would be a chapter regarding the birth of Washington’s modern wine industry.  There were several pioneers and one the most well regarded was a group of University of Washington professors who started as home winemakers, then bonded as Associated Vintners, and later became Columbia Winery.  The farmers of Eastern Washington that were growing apples, hops, cherries, concord grapes and wheat that tried their hand at vinifera grapes also played a role and one of those early growing pioneers, starting in 1957, was Otis Harlan at what is now Otis’ Vineyard north of Grandview on the Yakima/Benton County Line Road. 

This past Christmas, Barb and I made our first trip to Woodinville and visited Columbia Winery’s tasting room.  We tasted their entire line-up and there were a number of wines we might have purchased, but after we tasted a 2004 Otis Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon the choice was easy.  This vintage may have been one of the last wines made by David Lake, we’ll keep looking for future releases, and the grapes were sourced from our neighborhood.  Easy choice.

I took these pictures yesterday and we opened our first bottle of Columbia Winery David Lake Otis Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon today.  The nose is cassis and leather with some floral notes,  midpalate is light to medium body with bacon, smoke and mineral on the finish. This wine is quite elegant, particularly for a Cabernet Sauvignon, and was a perfect compliment to a lightly seasoned ribeye with baked potato and asparagus.

I sometimes ponder what will happen in this new millenium as Washington’s western winemakers and eastern vineyard farmers become the second generation, but this wine is a perfect tribute to its founder winemakers and those who began growing the grapes at The Source.