From the Introduction to "Washington Wines & Wineries - The Essential Guide"
University of California Press copyright 2007

Most wine books promise to take the snobbery out of wine, to cut through the “meaningless” ritual associated with wine, and give you the inside scoop on what to drink with your hamburger. Some drown you in technical detail; others pretend to reinvent the art of food and wine pairing, or point you to the best value wines (usually corporate plonk).

We’re not going there.

This is a book about a special time and a unique place in the history of wine. It’s about a state whose meaningful exploration of vinifera grapes is barely 40 years old. A state that has only recently discarded the deeply-held conviction that it was too cold to grow serious wine grapes. A state where many of the best winemakers live hundreds of miles from the vineyards, and truck their dusty bins of grapes over mountains and (sometimes) the Puget Sound to crush and ferment and barrel the wines.

They work in tiny rented spaces in faceless office parks, with battered forklifts, used barrels and borrowed de-stemmers and rented bottling lines. And they make better wines, in many instances, than the biggest, best-funded mega-wineries in the world.

I believe – and I hope you will come to agree with me – that Washington state is going to become one of the greatest wine regions in the world in the 21st century. This despite (or perhaps because of) its fringe location, its reliance on irrigation, its extreme desert growing conditions, its separation of growers and winemakers, its preponderance of tiny, under funded start-ups, and the persistent myth that it is too cold, too wet and too far north. In other words, despite the fact that Washington is not, and never will be, California.

When it comes to exploring unknown viticultural territory, and crafting stylistically original, world-class wines, Washington has come as far or farther, in less time, than California. Without California’s vast advantages, little Washington has plugged along, driven by dreamers and do-ers who believed that there was something magical in the land. 

People such as John Williams and Jim Holmes, who bought some barren acreage on a desolate hill called Red Mountain back in 1975, and decided to grow cabernet there. People such as Dr. William McAndrew, who planted gewürztraminer and a variety of other grapes in an old apple orchard high above the Columbia Gorge in 1972, dubbed it Celilo, and waited to see what, if anything would survive. People such as Christophe Baron, a native Champenois who made wine in half a dozen places around the world before circling for a landing in Walla Walla, then doggedly searched for land to plant until he found the rockiest, least-likely, most difficult and labor-intensive soil in the region and hand-planted his Cailloux vineyard to syrah.

Today Red Mountain cabernet and merlot and cabernet franc can stake a legitimate claim to greatness, as can Celilo gewürztraminer and Cailloux syrah. They have all passed the test of time, and also the test of timelessness. These vineyards express that elusive, often-abused (and misspelled) term terroir, which is not terrior (some sort of small dog/grape hybrid?) but the Holy Grail of winemaking. It is the pot of enological gold at the end of a long, dusty rainbow. Washington’s vignerons are beginning to find it, and therein lies the point and purpose of this book. 

There is something magical in this land. These pioneers were right about that, as are those who continue to explore and expand viticulture in Washington today. It’s true that the nine AVA’s now officially recognized include millions of acres of land that is not, and will never be, dedicated to wine grape growing. But tucked away here and there are the sites that work, that have the potential, if properly managed, to create exceptional wines. Finding those places is what has obsessed those who have pioneered winemaking during the first few decades of Washington’s modern wine era. 

There is nothing easy about this work, and the rewards, if they come at all, are often more artistic than financial. But for a wine lover, Washington has reached a delicious moment in time. How many people, in the history of the world, can say that they are witnessing the emergence of a brand new, world-class wine region? Who among us has tasted, in each new vintage, wines that push the envelope a bit farther than it has previously been pushed, that reveal unknown or unsuspected layers of flavor and bouquet, nuances previously locked away in a piece of scrub desert, or a rocky riverbed, or a mountainside blanketed in volcanic dust?

Steve Burns, who was Executive Director of the Washington Wine Commission from 1996 to 2004, was famously quoted a few years ago as noting that a new winery opened in Washington every ten days. That remarkable statistic captured the frenetic growth of the industry during his tenure. The almost-daily changes made it difficult for any writer to take the snapshot accurately. Though my own guides to Northwest Wines were long out of date, I wanted to wait a bit longer and let the dust settle before tackling this book.

The dust has not entirely settled, to be sure, but it has been mapped, studied, ripped, planted, trellised, irrigated, fertilized, chronicled and delineated into more and more meaningful appellations. The wineries and vineyards that survived the mistakes and trials of Washington’s early years have learned some hard-won lessons, making it easier for young, artisanal winemakers to craft superb wines. The growth of the state continues, but it is now possible to look closely at the past and present of Washington viticulture and make meaningful predictions about the future. That is the purpose of this new book.