Out of the Blues – Whisper Ridge – 2004 A Voix Basse – Washington State

by on Sep 11, 2010

Just like that, summer is over. Maybe it was our huge events in June and July, the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla, the Wedding of the Century in Illinois, and moving all of our worldly possessions. Maybe it was the lengthy cool spring. Or maybe it was just that I’m now officially old and all of my memories are now of nostalgic lazy summer days, even if it was just last week.

In Yakima, one of the signs of the end of summer, at least for the past 18 years, is the annual concert fund raiser for the Yakima Greenway Foundation called A Case of the Blues. Barb and I bought tickets during one of our Sunday trips to the Yakima Farmers Market, and went to the event for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

We’ve attended many similar events in Washington and elsewhere, and Barb and I were both very impressed with the organization, layout, and general positive vibe of A Case of the Blues.  The venue at Sarg Hubbard Park in Yakima is a fairly simple field with a walking trail and playground that had been transformed by white tents, temporary fencing, stage and porta potties into a first class concert venue for the day.  There was a large VIP tent with tables, beer, wine, and auction tents, and multiple food vendors up a hill a bit.  There was even a cigar vendor stuck off by himself, and the porta-potties were convenient, but noticably downwind of the rest of the park. It was obvious the layout had been fine tuned through the years. 

Barb and I took our lawn chairs, blanket, sunglasses, and sweaters and got there early enough to stake out a spot fairly near the main stage in the open grassy area.  Then we did what we always do, hit the wine tent.  The system here was tickets purchased for a buck each got you a taste for one chit, a full glass for 4-7 chits depending on the wine, and eventually we discovered bottles were available.  We saw many familiar faces and wineries, Neil from Steppe Cellars, Terry from Knight Hill, Phil from Naches Heights, and sampled some familiar and new wines from those line-ups. 

A few new to us wineries were there too. Actually, now that I think about it, only one totally new for us winery was pouring.  There were about 20 wineries pouring, and it’s at the same time comforting and a perhaps a little embarrassing that I could look around the tent and recognize all the labels and go through my mental Roladex deciding what I liked and what to try that day.  Anyway, the totally new to us winery was Whisper Ridge.  

At the Whisper Ridge table I introduced myself to Mandy and Bill and soon connected the dots to the rest of the winery community in Zillah where these guys are located.  Bill is also winemaker at Bonair and Barb and I had overheard the guys at Severino and Two Mountain talking about attending a wedding for Bill from Bonair the week before; so I congratulated Bill on his recent nuptials.  Whisper Ridge is a small, 500 or so case per year venture, and I asked besides A Case of the Blues, where to find their wines.  Mandy named several westside venues, and a few places in the Yak.   I wonder how I missed them before, but as I’ve learned , the tasting room trails are only one avenue for finding all the wines made in the Yakima Valley. 

From their line-up, I sampled everything they were pouring, and an easy favorite was a big, bold red wine call A Voix Basse.  After sampling a few others, and trying a rose with dinner (grilled burgers and chips), Barb and I were ready to settle in for the shows.  This picture is a little blurry, I think the bottle was empty by this time, but the bottle of A Voix Basse was a great compliment to the kettle corn dessert and rock-a-billy blues of our favorite band of the night, The Dirty 45′s.

I didn’t write tasting notes, but the true measure of this wine’s power is that after a glass or two, Barb was able to convince me to hit the dance floor grass, the area just in front of the stage. 

No fancy Lindy Hop or Fox Trot by any stretch, but when an engineer can get rhythm you know something must be working magic.    

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Selling Ice to Eskimos – Cascade Wine Company – Yakima, Washington

by on Aug 27, 2010

As you may have noticed, Barb and I have spent a LOT of time touring and drinking wine at the various wineries, tasting rooms, and events around the Yakima Valley and beyond over the past two years. By going place to place we get an opportunity to meet many of the people in the winery business, tromp past the rows of vineyard, and sometimes see the inner workings of the production side of the wine business. In the tasting room, we typically have the opportunity to taste through a line-up of several of a winery’s wines; for a small or newer winery sometimes ALL of their wines. Many times tasting is (still) free in the Yak, sometimes for a small fee. Practically every weekend, and even some weekdays, there is some sort of wine event in wine country where anywhere from a single; to a few; to over a hundred wineries are there pouring wines. Through these methods, Barb and I have tasted through literally thousands of different wines over the past two years. And, as our bank accounts can attest, we have bought hundreds.

 So, with this overflowing abundance of wine available for tasting and purchase as well as the admitted star-struck prospect of meeting the winemakers and winery owners, the romance of walking by the grapes growing on the vines, the sight of oak barrels stacked high in the cellar rooms and caves, and the sweet, sticky smells of harvest, why would anyone living in wine country need a wine store?

This is what I thought when I first visited Cascade Wine Company in Yakima soon after we moved here in 2008. We walked into Cascade’s store in downtown, asked what they made there, and quickly learned this wine company didn’t produce wine, but was a retailer selling wines. We had been into similar stores in our small town in the Midwest, and though we did sample a few wines that day and bought a bottle to take to dinner that night, frankly the excitement wasn’t there that we felt when we walked into the places where the wine was grown, made, and bottled under one roof.

About a month or so ago I was looking for the wine for one of Sean Sullivan’s virtual tastings (he always misses what we already have), so I went back into Cascade Wine Company. The store had moved from its previous location and is now on Yakima Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. I introduced myself to Jim Collins, the store owner, told him what I was looking for, which he didn’t happen to have, but just browsed the store for a while. This time, somewhat to my surprise, my perspective of what was on the shelves was a totally new experience.

I now recognized at least half of the wines and wineries in the Washington and Oregon sections, this comprises about half of Cascade’s inventory; and for the California and import sections of the store, I now had an interest again. Barb and I have realized our wine palates, while they have evolved over the past couple of years, have become pretty geographically narrow. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, but as we’ve done when we’ve traveled outside the state for the past year or so, it’s interesting to us to test our new palates, honed to Washington wines, against what else the world has to offer, whether it’s Virginia, California, British Columbia, or New Jersey.

Cascade offers wines from all over the world, and on that first visit back there I sampled a Spanish Rioja made from Tempranillo and Garnacha (Grenache), and some other grape that I don’t remember. My palate recognized the flavors and it’s interesting to expand and learn. As an aside, one thing Barb and I keep meaning to do is to buy some of our old standby wines from when we lived in Illinois, typical for us would be a Fonterra Chilean Cab/Merlot blend, $15 per 1.5 Liters, and see how our wine palates now react. Good? Ok? or What were we thinking?

Anyway, even with the Washington wine labels I know, I could now survey these shelves and pick out wine I either like or producers I know. Sometimes the wines are the same as tasting room line-ups, but often the vintages was different than what I had sampled, and it’s interesting that many times the wine now on the retail shelf is “sold out” at the tasting room. I’ve even seen wines that have long been sold out at the wineries on retail shelves and have stockpiled a few favorites that way. Cascade gets new releases too, and I’ve sampled many wines I haven’t seen yet traveling the tasting room trail. Though it seems like we may do this at times, it’s impossible to hit 100 plus tasting rooms every month.

Besides the Yakima Valley labels that I know (and love), Cascade’s Washington wine section includes many West Side wineries, I first bought and sampled a Kennedy Shah Malbec based on Jim’s recommendation, as well as Walla Walla, Columbia Gorge and other Washington wineries. This even includes local wineries such as DavenLore and Southard that are grown and made in the Yak; they just don’t yet have public tasting facilities.

Cascade has daily, or almost daily, tasting of wine as well, and Jim often has guest wineries and winemakers come into the shop to pour their wine and meet the Yakimites. (I’m not sure what actually sure Yakima residents call themselves, but I like Yakimites.) After my first revisit, Jim invited me back for a New Zealand themed tasting where they were going to be serving mutton. I’d just had mutton the day before, so I passed on that event.

The thing that I’ve realized that is the most attractive about having a Cascade Wine Company close by, even though we live in the middle of literally hundreds of tasting rooms, is that I’m basically lazy. I can go to Cascade and buy a case of mixed favorites, new tries, and long shots all in one place. My last trip in there I bought a wine gift for a friend which was a wine I had in my cellar at home, but I was giving the gift on the spot so this was my typical last-minute shopping. I also bought a bottle of California Zinfandel Jim recommended and a Gilbert Cellars Rosé of Mourvedre. This last bottle was the ultimate lazy convenience since the Gilbert tasting room is about a block east of Cascade Wine Company and within sight.

So, if you’re in Yakima and have a hankering for some mutton, or are inherently lazy like me and want to sample some of the area’s finest wines side by side with wines of the world, even California, try out Cascade Wine Company, now on Yakima Avenue, not 1st Avenue, in downtown Yak.

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Spam Samples and Clarification

by on Aug 27, 2010

I’m new to this writing thing, but as I’ve developed this blog I’ve tried to be more conscious of the fact someone might actually read this and that my opinions and the information I base them on might need to be checked by someone else.  This is particularly true when I interview someone directly or quote something someone said or wrote.  In those cases I’ve usually tried to give the subject the opportunity to review a draft of my blog before publishing it here.

For my recent blog on Paul Gregutt’s new book, Washington Wine and Wineries, Second Edition, I e-mailed a draft of the blog article to the folks at UC Press who had provided me with the book for review.  I didn’t think I had recieved a response from anyone and after a week published the blog as written.  Last week Sean Sullivan of Washington Wine Report published a review of the same book, and during some chatter in the comments, I learned that Mr. Gregutt himself had tried to contact me about my draft.  The folks at UC Press had forwarded my draft to Paul, and he had taken time to read it and e-mail me directly about some of the information contained in my review.

This is where the spam comes in.  Due to the wonders and vagaries of the internet, Paul’s e-mail to me had been filtered as spam by my e-mail provider, so I didn’t see the message until he pointed it out to me through his comments on Sean’s blog.   I apologize to Paul for this missed communication.

Paul and I subsequently had a nice dialogue off line about a few things in my review.  In particular, Paul clarified his methods of sampling wines and wineries and pointed me to the introduction of the book where this is explained.   After a re-read, it is clear that Mr. Gregutt does seek out wineries throughout Washington through his travels, at events, and through various avenues.   He also takes great care in how he tastes and reviews the wines he writes about.   The introduction to the book explains this is detail and I admit I either skimmed over most of this or forgot about it when I was dissecting the lists of wineries that appear later in the meat of the book.

The issue of samples, whether submitted by wineries or their representatives or obtained by Mr. Gregutt by request or through his travels, is clearer to me now.   I have my own opinions about wine samples in general, and think it’s really a topic that deserves a separate write up because, as I said in my original post about Mr. Gregutt’s book, I don’t have a problem with his sampling methods.

That said, I’ll close with a quote from Mr. Gregutt’s introduction regarding sampling and selection of wineries for his book that he pointed me to as the clearest he can be on the topic…

“If you already have your own list of favorite Washington wineries, you may find one or two missing from my own selections. Please do not take offense. Some are simply too new to evaluate. Some do not choose to take advantage of the many opportunities to submit their wines for review. Some simply do not suit my personal tastes.”

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Barbilocks and The Three Wines

by on Aug 15, 2010

Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful young maiden named Barbilocks. Barbilocks was under the spell of an extra, extra, extra large wine lover named Doakie who tempted Barbilocks with chocolates and sangiovese. After lots of chocolates, and even more bottles of wine, Barbilocks married Doakie and they moved west, eventually settling in the far, far, away kingdom of Cowiche in the magical land called the Yak.

One day, while Doakie was eating a large platter of chicken at a banquet, Barbilocks raised the number in her little hand and won a Grand Prize. Doakie became angry and tore the number into little pieces. But he still loved Barbilocks and she kept the tickets for the prize under her pillow.

After a long time, when the tickets had almost expired, Barbilocks made reservations to claim the prize, a weekend getaway to the Center of The Universe. Since it was a scary place, Barbilocks took Doakie along to drive her chariot.

They went out of the Yak and over the mountains, across the rivers, and over even more mountains until they got to the edge of the land, near the Sea(ttle). You may think it’s odd that The Center of the Universe is at the edge of the land, near the Sea, but it is so.

Barbilocks and Doakie found the small cottage near the Center of The Universe where they would sleep. This cottage was surrounded by green and blue trees, was gray and purple on the outside, and red and orange on the inside. It was a cozy and warm cottage and a magic code opened the door. Barbilocks and Doakie felt safe inside the cottage and the guest register listed other wine lovers from the land of the Yak and beyond who had stayed here when they came to the Sea. There was Charlie, and Eric, and Big John.

Outside the cottage, Barbilocks and Doakie went exploring the neighborhood in the Center of the Universe and found many, many, many strange and interesting things. Barbilocks wanted to get a tattoo, but Doakie was afraid. Barbilocks wanted to ride a Duck, but Doakie was afraid. Barbilocks wanted to visit the troll under the bridge, but Doakie was afraid.

What Doakie isn’t afraid of is wine. Barbilocks knew this and at every chance tried to find a wine that would make Doakie not afraid to get a tattoo, or ride the Ducks or visit the troll.

On the first day, Barbilocks and Doakie went to a place called the Hollywood Schoolhouse looking for wine. It looked familiar to a place near their homeland, the Jet Black wine tasted the same, and the people were nice, but they were different people and they didn’t hug Barbilocks and yell Doakie’s name when he came in the door. This made Barbilocks and Doakie sad, so they kept on looking.

On the second day, since they were near the Sea, Barbilocks and Doakie went to a place called Ray’s Boathouse. Since Ray’s is a popular place, Barbilocks and Doakie went to the bar to wait on a table and ordered a bottle of wine from a nearby Creek whose grapes came from the red mountain in the Yak that was bound to taste like home, there was even a horsey on the label.    Barbilocks and Doakie drank some of the wine, but since seafood is white, and the wine was red, something didn’t seem quite right and Doakie was still too afraid.

Finally, on the third day, Barbilocks and Doakie tried Ray’s neighbor’s house, Anthony’s.   There, the porridge was warm, not too hot, not too cold, and the wine Barbilocks ordered was Eroica Riesling.  It smelled like sugarplums and apricots and peaches and pineapples, it tasted like peaches and cream and honeysuckle blossoms, and there was a sparkle at the end.  Just Right.

This made Doakie very brave, if only for a short while, and as long as Barbilocks was holding his hand, Doakie agreed to get a tattoo.  He didn’t even cry (much).

Barbilocks and Doakie went home to the Yak and lived happily ever after.

 The End.

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The Essential Guide? – Walla Walla and the Rest

by on Aug 6, 2010

Have you ever picked up a travel or restaurant guide and been frustrated that the guide focused on one neighborhood when the guide was supposed to cover an entire region? Even without knowing the entire picture, sometimes you can just tell certain areas are getting short-sheeted. Sure, all areas may be listed and the major attractions covered, but it’s frustrating when one area has every single coffee shop listed but the other neighborhood only has the major hotels.

I first read Paul Gregutt’s Washington Wine and Wineries: The Essential Guide, 1st edition in September, 2008. Barb and I had moved to Washington in July, 2008 and on finding this book, I knew I had to have it to navigate through Washington Wine Country since Washington wine was just becoming a consuming passion of mine at that time. Barb bought me the book for my birthday and I consumed it cover to cover immediately, have kept it, and treated it as a reference text ever since. Whenever I taste or try a new Washington winery, now closing in on 200 wineries for us, I refer to Mr. Gregutt’s notes and rankings of the wines, wineries, vineyards, etc… Sometimes I agree with the opinions given, sometimes I don’t, but I have always found what Paul had to say interesting and his writing style is so readable that even this sometimes dense text, on a perhaps mundane subject, comes alive.

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.

As I previously mentioned, at the Wine Blogger’s Conference a month ago in Walla Walla, I scooped up an advance copy of the Second Edition of this book for review. I was pretty excited about it and enjoyed reading the book over the past month, mainly looking for changes from the first edition, but also trying to maintain a first time reader’s view. Since I’m not a first-time reader or even a new explorer of Washington’s wines, I think it’s interesting to see how I now view this work.

This Second Edition carries all of the same positive notes of the first. The writing style is still exceptionally readable, and the depth of knowledge of Washington and its wines is impressive. The fact that this second edition comes so close behind the first, less than five years, is explained well and the book truly does stand on its own as a significant work. Of course, much of the material is taken from the first edition, but the new reader, or even a reader of the first edition, can learn vast amounts of information by reading this book.

The expanded section on Washington’s Top Vineyards (now twenty vs. ten in the first edition), I think, is well chosen and reflects the positive growth many others have observed in the quality of the fruit being produced in a large and growing number of Washington’s vineyards. I certainly don’t have much of a historical perspective on Washington State, but the history of the state’s federally-designated American Viticultrual Areas, or AVA’s, and possible future developments in some of the key wine regions of the state are also an updated and fair assessment in my view.

All that said, there are some issues I have with this edition and the book in general that I think make it hard for the book to support its subtitle “The Essential Guide”. It is true that this could certainly be Mr. Gregutt’s essential guide, or “A Guide” but I think there are a number of flaws in his method and in this book that make it hard for the wine community of Washington in general to accept this book as the end-all-be-all of Washington wine books. That, to me, is what “essential” means, a complete review of everything worth reviewing on a particular topic, in this case Washington’s wines and wineries.

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.

_____________________

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!

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The Lightning Rod – Bonair 2006 Merlot – Rattlesnake Hills

by on Aug 4, 2010

I’ve written about the Rattlesnake Hills Wine Trail previously, and though Bonair Winery could stand alone as a small to mid-sized family run winery located in Zillah, the owners Gail and Shirley Puryear and Bonair are so intertwined with the Rattlesnake Hills Wine Trail and the Rattlesnake Hills AVA that it’s almost impossible to think of Bonair without discussing the Rattlesnake Hills WT/AVA and the controversy surrounding it.

 

That controversy, such as it was/is, occurred mainly before our arrival in Washington in 2008 and revolved around the approval of the Rattlesnake Hills AVA which was finalized in 2006. How I even knew of any such controversy was by reading about the creation of this AVA in Paul Gregutt’s Washington Wine & Wineries, by noticing that some wineries in and around Zillah are not members of the RHWT and don’t use Rattlesnake Hills on their labels, and then via here-say and second or third-hand talk with various people in the wine trade around the Yakima Valley. Since I certainly don’t know all sides of the story though, I’ll just say that the Rattlesnake Hills AVA and its use as designation for wines is still a lightning rod topic and when I’ve asked winery owners in this section of the Yakima Valley about the whys and why nots of the RHWT and using the Rattlesnake Hills AVA label I’ve gotten varied reactions. Sometimes the reaction is defensive, sometimes rather evasive, sometimes almost hostile; but always…there is a reaction.

Bonair Winery, as it exists today, is like many other small to mid-sized wineries in Washington. Bonair produces around 5,000 cases of wine per year and has a full line-up of whites, reds, and roses. Barb and I have been to the tasting room in Zillah probably a half dozen times. During our first trips through the RHWT the Trail group offered a prize/reward to anyone getting 10 or 12 stamps at the various wineries on the Trail Passport. I completed a couple of these Passports myself, and Barb joined me on a few laps too. We collected a set of five of the RHWT large wine goblets. On a trip last spring to Bonair, looking for number 6, we were told the prizes weren’t available anymore. This was a little irritating since we had a just completed card at the time, but such is life, things change and offers expire.

The wine Barb and I have enjoyed several times on the patio at Bonair is Sunset, a wine that according to the data sheet is made from an uncommon varietal conveniently named Sunset. This is semi-sweet patio wine and, out of Bonair’s line-up, is a favorite for sipping on the patio eating tapas, feeding the ducks, and petting Bung, the winery dog (similar to the folks in this photo). We’ve taken a few bottles home, too.

A few months ago, I realized through Sean Sullivan’s WA Wine Report, that Gail, owner and winemaker of Bonair, had started a wine blog entitled The Grumpy Winemaker. Grump, as I like to call the on-line Gail, is a no-holds barred blogger who has opinions about many things, his customers, the wine critics, and wine bloggers among them. Grump maintains that his blog is not associated with Bonair Winery, but just like the distinction between the RHWT and the Rattlesnake Hills AVA is blurred, so is the line between The Grumpy Winemaker and Bonair Winery. The Grumpy Winemaker too might be considered a lightning rod and I’d doubt a course on social media for wineries would endorse this type of blog as the best way to attract attention. Nonetheless, I enjoy Grump’s blogs.

While Barb was away for the pre-wedding hoopla, I decided to revisit Bonair. It was my first trip there since I’d become a blogger and my first trip since reading a lot of Gail’s thoughts as The Grumpy Winemaker. I contemplated doing everything I could to violate Grump’s advice for proper tasting room etiquette, including wearing a Canadian hat. Or announcing my presence as a wine blogger and requesting some special treatment or extra samples. The worst thing I might have done would have been to try to sell my services to Gail as an internet web design expert. That would make Gail really grumpy.

But, I decided to just be my normal self.

Bonair’s tasting room line-up is somewhat unique in that they offer about 4 tiers of wines, a sweet free tier, a dry free tier, and the reserve tier of a chardonnay and dry reds, and a tier of ports. I decided ahead of time to sample the reserve wines this trip. We had skipped these previously since with the RHWT Passport, the “free wine” pours seemed more alluring, there is a $5 fee for sampling the reserves, and we’d found a patio wine we liked.

That hot Saturday in early July, Bonair’s tasting room was fairly crowded which we’ve found is normal. The crowd at Bonair seems to consists of folks who know the Puryears and have been customers for decades, Bonair is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and folks who found it from the RHWT map, some for the first time, some for the umpteenth, like myself. By the way, Bonair’s policy of 4 pours per customer is, I think, one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen on the wine trail. It lets, or forces, people to focus on what they like, reduces their chance of getting too smashed in this tasting room, and limits the amount of free booze the winery gives away in any given day.

So I sampled the reserve line-up. The Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Malbec, and Cabernet Franc all seemed too light for my palate. Even the Chardonnay which is barrel fermented didn’t seem to have the depth or body I have come to expect from Washington wines. Since I was spitting and pouring my samples (and paying) and having a nice conversation with my pourer, I asked if I could extend beyond my 4 pours. She agreed and I tried the Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Both were very interesting wines, though it took me two sips of the Cab to think so, the tannins of the first sip sucked the moisture out of my mouth.

I asked the pourer her favorite; it was the Merlot, so I bought a bottle to take home. The tasting fee was deducted from the bottle price; I thanked Gail, who had snuck out and was serving another customer, and I made my merry way home.

I drank this wine over two days with my bachelor friend, Frank. The first night we paired with steak and potato. The Merlot starts out lighter than many Washington Merlots but over the course of the meal, the balance and fruit, and floral and subtle spice notes were outstanding. This wine is made for food. The glass or so that made it to day two (Frank is a lightweight), were even better and I think I paired those with a grilled burger.

The RHWT and Rattlesnake Hills AVA may be wrought with controversy and Gail, the Grumpy Winemaker, may be a fairly polarizing figure too, but the bottom line is…

Bonair makes some pretty damn good wines.  See you again soon, Grump.

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