This book was also highly regarded in the wine press and got glowing reviews from the Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate (competing publications to the author’s Wine Enthusiast), New York Times, wine bloggers (including this one), and wine writers everywhere. I’ve seen copies of the book in libraries, book stores, wine shops, and tasting rooms across Washington State. I don’t have anything to substantiate this, other than the publication of a second edition, but I’d imagine the book is selling very well.

First, I’ll suggest that it is impossible for any one reviewer to give a fair comparative review to all 650-700 Washington wineries. I think the number of active, producing wineries in the state is actually probably closer to 450-500, but still, that is a large number and that number has grown almost exponentially in the past 5-10 years, from about 150-200 wineries just at the beginning of this century to the number listed today. The book addresses this explosive growth of Washington’s wine industry, hence the need for this 2nd edition, but with that explosive growth, I think the challenge of finding and identifying all of the essential wineries in Washington is simply too much for one person.

The implication of this book, especially with the expanded winery list to about half of the state’s total, is that Mr. Gregutt is telling the reader, buy or visit this group of Washington wineries. Though not stated, it is certainly implied that if a winery is not listed, then it is not “essential” and therefore may be overlooked or bypassed by the reader with no loss to them. Visitors or wine buyers from outside the region are very likely to follow this implied advice.

Secondly, I have a hard time accepting this book as a fair slice of the best wineries Washington has to offer. I don’t have a problem with a ranking of the top half of anything, that’s what I’d be interested in if I was looking for the best restaurants, best shoe stores, whatever; but I hope that slice of the best is evenly and fairly distributed across whatever segment the author presents as his or her scope of review. One thing that makes me think that there are wineries left out of this work that should be “essential” is a simple mathematical analysis of the wineries that are listed. It is well known that Mr. Gregutt lives in both Seattle and Waitsburg in Walla Walla County. It is without question that many of the state’s leading wineries and winemakers are located in Walla Walla. But the math of this book would tell me that practically ALL of the wineries in Walla Walla are essential, while the wineries located elsewhere in the state are, as a group, much less worthy.

This guide lists 89 Walla Walla wineries in its ranked winery section. Many are rated highly and in each category, from 5/5 stars on down, there are more Walla Walla wineries than from any other segment of the state, even including the “Want More?” list that is buried in the section on Rising Star wineries. Assuming there are about 100 active wineries in Walla Walla, that’s almost a 90% inclusion rate. If you assume the wineries in the remainder of the state are about 350 in number (conservatively low), the inclusion of 146 of those wineries would suggest that 42% of non-Walla Walla wineries are “essential”, less than half the inclusion rate of Walla Walla.

This concentration of the best wineries in the state in one area is perhaps possible, but other reviewers, or certainly an editorial board of reviewers from all areas of the state, are likely to disagree with this wide of a disparity of “essential” wineries in the state. The other main wine regions of Washington with concentrations of wineries are Woodinville (near Seattle), and the Yakima Valley and its “daughter” AVA’s between the cities of Yakima and the Tri-Cities. These areas have a higher inclusion rate than the rest of the state, about 60% for Woodinville* and about 50% for Yakima, but even these areas trail far behind Walla Walla in numbers of wineries included and the strength of those ratings, both in hard numbers and relative to the total winery population of the state. Outside those areas, the inclusion rate is very small and less than a third of all wineries in the Seattle/Puget Sound (besides Woodinville), Columbia Gorge, Lake Chelan, Spokane and North Central Washington regions are included as “essential”.

*[For Woodinville Wineries, I’m counting those with primary winery and tasting room in Woodinville. For wineries who have tasting rooms in Woodinville but are made elsewhere (and there are some of these) I’ve counted them in their “home” region.]

Third, a twist to this that makes the domination of Walla Walla as the essential wine region of the state even stranger to me is the fact that Washington’s wine makers have almost equal access to the same grape supplies regardless of where the wineries and tasting rooms may be located. The large vineyard acreages of the state are in the Columbia Valley (mainly the area north of the Tri-Cities up to Quincy that is not further subdivided), the Yakima Valley and its daughter AVA’s (Red Mountain, Rattlesnake Hills, and Snipes Mountain), the Horse Heaven Hills, and the Wahluke Slope. In other areas, including the Walla Walla AVA, planted vinifera acres are growing, but still winemakers from all over the state, including Walla Walla, buy large volumes of grapes from the other “export” growing AVA’s. This fact is discussed in Mr. Gregutt’s book and is highlighted by the Top Vineyards section where the vast majority of the vineyards listed, 15 out of 20, do not even have estate wineries, and most of the others also provide more grapes to outside wineries than they consume “in house”. The exceptions to this are Cayuse and Cold Creek (owned by Chateau St. Michelle) even though those vineyards too are occasionally sourced to other winemakers.

It should also be noted that the Top Twenty vineyards, without spoiling their identities, are distributed pretty much following the pattern described above on where the big acres are. The Yakima Valley and its daughters get eight spots, Columbia Valley gets four spots, Horse Heaven Hills and Walla Walla get three each, and the remaining two are split between the Wahluke Slope/Ancient Lakes area and the Columbia Gorge.

This vineyard/winemaker distribution, which is fairly unique to Washington state, means garagiste wineries in Spokane, or South Seattle, or Vancouver have almost the same opportunity to make good wines as the winemakers of Walla Walla. Mr. Gregutt’s book suggests they are only about a third as successful in doing that. How could those wineries even hope to compete or stay in business if that ratio was accurate, when the growth rate and sustainability rate of wineries all across the state seems to be fairly even?

Fourth, and I think this is a mitigating factor, Mr. Gregutt does not clearly, in this book, provide his policy for sampling and reviewing wines and/or wineries. I know of his policies from reading his blog and other work and know that for a winery to receive consideration they must submit samples to Mr. Gregutt; he does not seek out the wineries, they must seek him. There is no harm inherent in that policy since Mr. Gregutt is an established wine critic, but there are certainly opportunities for wineries to be missed in a population of 450-500. I also know his ranking of 100 top wines each year, now included as a chapter in this book, is subject to the same policy, i.e. a winery must submit for review to be included. That is how Cayuse, one of the top rated wineries in the state has top ten wines, #3, #6, and #2 for the first 3 years of these ratings, but is not even listed in the top 100 for 2009. I think this policy and perceived inconsistency should at least be explained to the reader.

I firmly believe there is plenty of gray area for any listing of “top wineries”, “best wines”, or what is “essential” no matter what the subject matter. However, I’ll provide an example of a winery in Washington State that I believe has a strong case for inclusion on any list of “essentials”. Also provided is a listing for a winery that Mr. Gregutt includes as a Rising Star. Maybe that winery is or will be an essential, but for now I think its inclusion is simply home cooking, and while I don’t have a problem with that as long as that’s what it is and is disclosed, in this book its inclusion as an “essential” winery likely means another winery elsewhere in the state was left out.

The example of a winery excluded from this book, even though I’ve never purchased or even sampled their wines, is Adams Bench of Woodinville. It is a relatively new winery, like many other just-as-new wineries listed in Mr. Gregutt’s book. To my knowledge, Adams Bench has never submitted a wine to Mr. Gregutt for review, but they are consistently ranked very highly by other raters. One rater in particular, Mr. Rand Sealey, has been drinking and reviewing Washington wines, as well as wines from all over the world, for the past 40+ years. Again, palate preferences obviously may explain some differences, but Mr. Sealey rated an Adams Bench wine a perfect 20 out of 20, the first time ever for a Washington wine in his reviews. Also, all of the ratings I’ve seen for Adams Bench wines by Mr. Sealey, Wine Advocate and other raters have been consistently at or above 90 points (equivalent). CellarTracker, an on-line database where users log and track and rate their wines, currently includes 12 wines from Adams Bench with a total inventory of 231 bottles. Those Adams Bench wines that have been drank and rated by CellarTracker members agree with the critic ratings and average around 90 points. By comparison just on the inventory side, of the ten wineries that begin with the letter “M” (randomly selected) in Mr. Gregutt’s chapter on Rising Stars, only Maryhill (founded in 1999) and Milbrandt (a 10,000+ case winery with national distribution) have more wines purchased and tracked in Cellar Tracker. How such a winery as Adams Bench can be omitted from “the essential guide” to Washington’s wineries is beyond me.

On the flip side of this disparity, a hometown “winery” of Mr. Gregutt’s, the Laht Neppur Brewing Company of Waitburg near Walla Walla is included in the book as a Rising Star. Laht Neppur is a local micro-brewery that produces beer for consumption on-site though they do allow for growlers and kegs to be taken off-site. As a sideline, recently Laht Neppur began making wines, and to date has released one dessert wine, one red wine, and one white wine though I don’t believe the wines are distributed for off-site sales. I’ve never tasted Laht Neppur’s wine, or their beer, but I’ve also never seen them get any other reviews or have any acclaim that would warrant inclusion as an “essential” Washington winery. In CellarTracker, there are approximately 424,000 bottles of Washington wine in users’ inventories; there are 1,131 producers listed. This high number of producers is due to some duplication/typos, inclusion of out of state wineries using Washington fruit, and apparently quite a few home wine makers in Washington who’ve used CellarTracker to track their wine. As of today, there are zero Laht Neppur wines listed or rated in CellarTracker and the winery is not even listed as a producer. What could possibly make Laht Neppur an essential Washington winery?

Mr. Gregutt’s review of Laht Neppur ends with this sentence:

“Don’t expect to find these wines anywhere but in the neighborhood anytime soon, but it is yet another reason to make the tiny town of Waitsburg – home, too, of jimgermanbar and The Whoopemup Hollow Café – a must-see on any visit to Walla Walla wine country.” [my bold]

Funny, I thought the title of the book was Washington Wines & Wineries, not A Visitor’s Guide to Walla Walla County.

Again, I believe this book is an extremely valuable resource for anyone interested in Washington wine. I also believe though that the full picture is not told by this edition and a reader needs to be aware of the methods and preferences of the author, Mr. Gregutt. Walla Walla is a beautiful and burgeoning wine region that I look forward to exploring more as I continue on my journey through Washington Wine Country and so far the wines I’ve sampled from Walla Walla stand up to, but are not ahead of, wines made elsewhere in the state.

I’ve seen discussed quite a bit recently, there is Walla Walla and then there is the “Rest of Washington”, and, in my opinion, the “Rest” is equally as essential as Walla Walla to gaining a full view of what Washington Wine Country has to offer.

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POST SCRIPT:

Finally, there are a number of factual errors that should be corrected. No offense to the fine folks at University of California Press (who did give me this book afterall), but an editorial review by other Washington State reviewers I believe would eliminate many of these mistakes.

One in particular that has bugged me, and it was in the first edition is well, is Mr. Gregutt’s description of the drive from Yakima to Cold Creek vineyard, one of the Top Vineyards in the state.

“Heading east from Yakima on Highway 24, you drive for about 35 miles…The Umptanum Ridge is on your North, the Yakima Ridge is on your south, the Rattlesnake Hills are the next ridge over from there.”

This is incorrect; Highway 24 bisects the Yakima and Rattlesnake Hills ridgelines. Close to Cold Creek, at mile marker 32, the highway tops the Yakima Ridge, but most of the vast area between the Umptanum and Yakima Ridgelines is part of the Yakima Firing Center. Readers following Mr. Gregutt’s directions might get arrested by the Military Police, or worse yet, BLOWN UP!

Cheers from the Rest!