A NYT article about Walla Walla, in general and about their wines. The
writer seems to have captured the essence of small-town Washington
pretty well. Login required but it's free. I hope this link works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/di...9512000&en=3D=
8147ec91111a4dfa&ei=3D5088&partner=3Drssnyt&emc=3D rss

Ah what the hell here's the stolen article. Really though, why not
sign up for the NY Times online. It's free and great stuff.

By R. W. APPLE Jr.
Published: July 20, 2005

WALLA WALLA, Wash.

THE landscape that unfolds beneath the little plane as it wends its way
east from Seattle is not very welcoming. First come the daunting peaks
of the Cascade Range, and then a sparsely populated near-desert.
Eventually, it lets down over a series of vast sand dunes that are
cloaked during spring and early summer in an emerald-green mantle of
winter wheat. Soon the small, ordered city of Walla Walla ("many
waters," in the language of the Cayuse Indians) comes into view.

Walla Walla is as improbable as its name. It is a remote yet worldly
community of 30,000, famous for sweet onions and more recently for
world-class merlot and cabernet sauvignon, near the place where
Washington, Oregon and Idaho meet. "The town so nice they named it
twice," the Chamber of Commerce rather cloyingly calls it.

It reminded me of St. Helena in the Napa Valley 35 years ago, when that
town was just emerging as a wine capital, before it was overrun by
Silicon Valley zillionaires and tourists on excursions from San
Francisco. It seems safe from that fate; the nearest big city, Spokane,
125 miles away, is short of both tourists and zillionaires.

Like all wine areas, Walla Walla flourishes because of its soils and
its climate. The valley once lay under 1,200 feet of water, impounded
by a sheet of ice. When the water was released by the melting ice, it
left behind a layer of unusually deep, well-drained silt, known as
loess. Temperatures are ideal for wine grapes: extremely hot days in
summer, nights as much as 25 to 40 degrees cooler.

Two Army Reserve chums, Gary Figgins and Rick Small, put Walla Walla
wines on the map. A burly, unpretentious man who likes to laugh, Mr.
Figgins started as an amateur winemaker, inspired by holiday visits to
California vineyards. He founded Leonetti Cellar in 1977 - naming it
for his maternal grandparents, who immigrated from Italy - and produced
its first wines the next year. A quarter-century later, Leonetti has
attained cult status, its name whispered from one aficionado to
another.

Even in Seattle, Leonetti is relatively rare in restaurant wine
cellars, and it isn't cheap. At Wild Ginger, Rick Yoder's bustling
pan-Asian brasserie there, where markups are relatively modest, the
1999 Leonetti cabernet lists for $144 a bottle, and the 2000 vintage
will set you back $152.

So what makes Leonetti special? Mr. Figgins opens his cellar to the
public only once a year, and then only to those on his mailing list,
some of whom come from as far away as Atlanta to pick up their
allocations. When he made an exception for me, several things became
immediately clear.

More than any other producer I have visited, he emphasizes cleanliness
in the winery, believing that even a few germs can spoil a wine. Most
winemakers draw wine for tasting from a barrel with a device called a
pipette, fill glasses, taste and put what's left back into the barrel.
Not Mr. Figgins. He throws away the leftovers.

He uses unusual quantities (17 percent in 2002) of one of the "minor"
Bordeaux grapes, petit verdot, along with cabernet and merlot, to add
depth to his coveted reserve wine. And he uses barrels of several sizes
and ages to control oakiness.

"But it's really all about biological management," he insisted.
"Throwing away all those chemicals. The world has to change, and here
we already have."

In a pair of tanks, Mr. Figgins brews what he calls earth tea. In goes
compost and out comes a liquid for drip irrigation that, he says, "will
make anything grow" - vines, lilacs, trees like the oaks and aspens he
has planted all over his property. A new Leonetti vineyard, planted on
hard, inadequately friable, poorly drained land that had been
conventionally farmed, sprang back to life after a few gulps of earth
tea.

Mr. Figgins started in a tiny building the size of a one-car garage,
which makes him the literal American equivalent, I suppose, of the
small-scale "garagistes" of Bordeaux. He dedicated a sparkling new
winery in 2000, but still produces only about 6,200 cases a year -
"slightly more than P=E9trus," he joked.

Mr. Small's Woodward Canyon, founded in 1981, has also limited its
output, putting out about 15,000 cases annually. Lean and outgoing,
with close-cropped gray hair, Mr. Small gives his old friend full
credit for getting him into the game: "He turned me on." Both of them
make taut, elegant and boldly flavored wines, and their robust merlots
are surely among the best produced anywhere in the United States.

They are neither watery nor hyper-concentrated. Mr. Small has a thing
about jammy, overrich wines. "If I wanted jam, I'd go to Smucker's," he
said.

Many other producers have followed the lead of Mr. Figgins and Mr.
Small. Among the more successful have been Seven Hills, which makes
excellent wines under its own name, including a tempranillo, as well as
selling grapes to Mr. Figgins; L'Ecole No. 41, named for an old country
schoolhouse; and Cayuse, a Rhone-style specialist founded by a
Frenchman, Christophe Byron, whose yellow-fronted tasting room on Walla
Walla's main drag is open only a couple of weekends a year. Abeja
Winery, housed on a 100-year-old wheat farm, with the highly regarded
John Abbott as winemaker, is widely seen as a comer.

In 1990, the Walla Walla valley had five wineries. In 2003 the total
reached 38, and today there are more than 60.

"We have quite a little secret out here, don't we?" asked Thomas E.
Cronin, who recently retired as president of Whitman College, a
nationally esteemed liberal arts school. Its most famous alumnus was
the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who helped put himself
through college by sweeping up at Falkenberg's Jewelers and who kept a
cabin in the nearby Blue Mountains during his time on the court.

Actually, Walla Walla is not so secret anymore. For years, such artists
as Jim Dine, Louise Bourgeois and the late Edward Kienholz and Nancy
Graves have come here to cast sculptures at Mark Anderson's Walla Walla
Foundry, one of the foremost establishments of its kind. Mr. Dine even
has a house in Walla Walla.

Martin Clubb, the son of a Texas oilman, told me that "this is a town
where you can dial a wrong number and get someone you know." But that
will not last long. Mr. Clubb, who has a business degree from M.I.T.,
and his wife, Megan, who used to have a high-powered finance job in San
Francisco, came here to run L'Ecole 41, which was founded by Mrs.
Clubb's father. She is also the president of the Baker Boyer Bank here.

Family ties brought them to Walla Walla. Others have been lured by good
local fly-fishing, hiking, skiing and snowboarding. Still others were
seduced by the leisurely pace of life - "We don't have a rush minute,
let alone a rush hour," Mr. Cronin said - and the old-fashioned charm
of Main Street, lined with low-rise Beaux Arts storefronts from the
1910's and 1920's, revitalized at a cost of $53 million.

Happily, the town has not been Disneyfied. Old-line businesses survive,
like Falkenberg's and the neon-bedecked Italian-American Pastime Caf=E9,
founded in 1927 and specializing in trend-bucking "ravioli with
meatballs or Italian sausage."

Tourists are coming, too, in manageable numbers so far, because Walla
Walla is difficult to get to. On Spring Release Weekend early in May,
when the pink dogwoods lining the streets are in full bloom, the
weather is usually benign and all the wineries are open for tasting,
there are often no hotel rooms available within 60 miles.

Come the tourists, come the chefs. When Lewis and Clark passed this way
in 1805 and again in 1806, they survived some days on a diet of
horsemeat and wild fennel. About a decade ago, when Pierre Rovani, the
wine critic, came visiting, things had not improved all that much. A
clerk at a local motel recommended that he take his choice of fast-food
outlets or, if he insisted on "fine dining," drive south across the
Oregon border to a joint that specialized in "blackened prime rib and
$10 hookers."

No more. For lunch at Town Creek Caf=E9, order a burger made from
locally raised beef, and follow with unctuous bread pudding made from
the owner's grandmother's recipe. At Nicole Bunker's Grapefields, a
wine shop-***-bistro, pick a wine off the shelves (or, if you're lucky,
a local rarity from beneath them) and drink it with your meal, maybe a
flank steak with blue-cheese butter or a wild-mushroom pizza.

Mike Davis left the glamorous Salish Lodge near Seattle to open 26 Brix
on Main Street, which stars local products. The night my wife, Betsey,
and I stopped in, he was offering Washington troll-caught salmon with
asparagus from Locati farms outside Walla Walla, which also produces
the raw materials for his exquisite caramelized sweet onion consomm=E9
with onion ravioli.

As it happens, the Walla Walla region is uncommonly rich in raw
materials, unlike Las Vegas, for example, where everything must be
flown in. Pierre-Louis and Joan Monteillet - he's from the south of
France - produce goat's- and sheep's-milk cheeses near Dayton, just
northeast of Walla Walla. Adam and Sarah Sisk grow organic vegetables.
Joel and Cynthia Huseby raise steers, sheep and chickens by
19th-century, free-range methods at Thundering Hooves Ranch. Robison
Ranch is the nation's largest producer of shallots. Prime lentils (95
percent of American production) come from the Palouse region straddling
the Idaho-Washington border. And morels and chanterelles carpet the
floors of Blue Mountain forests in spring and fall.

Many of these products come together on the menu of
Whitehouse-Crawford, housed in a handsome old planing mill built in
1904 that was restored by Sonia and Carl Schmitt and opened as a
restaurant in 2000. The Schmitts brought in Jamie Guerin from Campagne
in Seattle as chef, and Mrs. Schmitt has scoured the countryside for
scarce ingredients for his kitchen, even distributing golden beet seeds
to farmers.

With floors of magnificent red fir two-by-twelves and seating for 110,
it quickly developed a big-city buzz and became the canteen for the
local wine trade. Tom Olander oversees the region's best wine cellar,
with all of the local biggies listed.

Mr. Guerin served the Schmitts, Betsey and me and a tableful of serious
local eaters and drinkers a wonderfully balanced, intensely regional
and seasonal meal, chock-full of the flavors of here and now. It
started with a pork, chile and sweet onion tamal and continued with
perfectly pink wild Alaskan king salmon (whose season had opened only a
few days before) and local asparagus; greens with Monteillet goat
cheese, ribeye steak with local morels and a dandy rhubarb and ginger
cream Napoleon.

No hick-town food, this.

This is a pretty good glimpse of the Walla Walla area as regards food
and wine. There are a couple of minor errors that I caught -- minor
quibbles only:

(1) Loess (prononced "luss") is the term for wind-deposited soil, not
flood-deposited as stated. But I believe both kinds are present in the
Walla Walla appellation.
(2) The proprietor of Cayuse's name is spelled Christophe Baron, not
Byron.

Salut/Hi,

le/on 20 Jul 2005 21:53:31 -0700, tu disais/you said:-

>A NYT article about Walla Walla, in general and about their wines. The
>writer seems to have captured the essence of small-town Washington
>pretty well. Login required but it's free. I hope this link works.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/di...rssnyt&emc=rss
>
>Ah what the hell here's the stolen article. Really though, why not
>sign up for the NY Times online. It's free and great stuff.
>
>By R. W. APPLE Jr.
>Published: July 20, 2005

I was sad to see no mention of some even MORE interesting wineries, Rulo,
whose (?firehouse?) is an excellent moderately priced Merlot, and "K" for
example, whose idiosyncratic winemaker makes tongues wag throughout the
region, and Woodward Canyon Winery, next to Ecole 41, whose owner's
enthusiasm has to be experienced to be believed. And of course no mention of
Walla walla could be complete without mentioning North Star winery.

What the article didn't mention, was that the Oregon Trail passes through,
and that long before winemaking, there was a strong french influence. Even
Cayuse, the name of a winery in the article and also of a local tribe of
Indians, bears witness to this, like Nez Perce and The Dalles.
--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
mailbox full to avoid spam. try me at website