America's second wine state could try harder

Jancis Robinson

Friday 25 June 2004 • 5 min read

In my capacity as British Airways’ wine consultant I went out to Heathrow recently for a blind tasting of 65 American red wine candidates for Club Class trolleys. As usual they had been divided into sensible categories so I knew which were Pinot Noir, which Zinfandel, which Merlot, which blends, which Syrah and which (the majority) were Cabernet Sauvignon. This was neither the best nor the worst of tastings, and prices have, not before time, softened thanks to the soggy domestic market in the US.

What surprised me most about the tasting once the wines’ identities had been revealed was how well Washington state wines had performed. Although only nine of the 65 wines had been grown in the semi-desert of eastern Washington rather than the lush vineyards of California, two of our three favourite wines had come from Washington, Gordon Brothers’ lively Merlot 2001 and Chateau Ste Michelle’s competent Syrah 2001.

I was first impressed by the pure, bright fruit and refreshing acidity of wines produced in these desert conditions, thanks to irrigation from the Columbia river, more than 20 years ago when we imported some Washington Merlot for the first wine list of L’Escargot, then an all-American affair. I have been following the fortunes of America’s second most important wine state ever since.

On a recent visit to Seattle, involving extensive tasting of what is currently on offer, I wondered whether the state had lost a little momentum however. The wines are certainly far more sophisticated than they were in the early 1980s, and are made from a much wider and more interesting range of grape varieties (I have already reported on Washington Riesling’s return to form but that is only a small part of the story). I feel however that the improvement gradient has not been quite as steep as in some other wine regions.

Comparisons with California are inevitable. Indeed it is difficult to conduct a conversation with anyone in Washington wine without the C-word hanging like a spectre in the southern distance. One of Washington wine industry’s mantras is that its vineyards enjoy on average two hours’ more sunshine per day in the growing season than those in California. But while there is no doubt that there are dozens of world-class, truly punctilious, quality-driven wine producers operating today in California whose wines are different from but can stand comparison with the best of the best made elsewhere, in Washington I did not find as many of the passionately, doggedly ambitious producers who carry any wine region’s reputation on their shoulders as I had hoped.

Perhaps this was because my tastings took place under the auspices of Taste Washington, a vast and admirable consumer event that may have excluded some of the most idiosyncratic oddballs, but too few of the Washington wines I tasted in Seattle really set my heart racing. This churlish complaint should be seen in the context of the fact that California produces in total about 20 times as much wine as Washington, where the number of grape growers is a relatively modest 300 and the number of wineries not that much more than 100.

Nevertheless, new producers of Washington wine have been mushrooming recently, and they tend to be smaller outfits with an increasing reliance on estate-grown fruit rather than the relatively large operations heavily dependent on outside growers (often apple farmers in another life) which dominated the early Washington wine industry.

One of the most inspiring to have come my way was K Vintners, a modest ranch in Walla Walla, Washington’s most prestigious red wine region with a surprising paucity of vineyards (just 1,000 acres) though not wineries. There seems to be a strong Bonny Doon ethic here with bottlings going by such respective names as The Beautiful and The Boy. Syrah is the variety of choice with winemaker Charles Smith (who intrigued me with his claim that his brother was “head of Queens’ Cambridge”) and both the Cougar Hills 2002 and The Boy 2002 are truly stunning wines with a real sense of place that California would be hard-pushed to match at 30 to 35 dollars a bottle. This 4,000-case operation opened its doors only in 2001.

Like Cadence, Matthews and Whitman, Frenchman Christophe Baron is also pushing the envelope with his Cayuse label (and helped give K Vintners a big helping hand at the beginning), another Walla Walla specialist in single vineyard Syrahs, some of them grown in the same vineyards as K Vintners are buying from.

Washington is a geographically puzzling place for a European visitor. The two most common appellations found on labels, apart from the ultra-flexible ‘Washington’ pure and simple, are Columbia Valley, which encompasses an extraordinary 11 million acres of land, in which are planted 17,000 acres of vineyard, and Yakima Valley with another 10,000 acres of vines. And among those who do decide to bottle single vineyard wines rather than blending the produce of several from within these vast areas, the same vineyard names keep cropping up on different producer’s labels. Winemaking and grape growing really are very separate activities in Washington – so far.

Syrah has become increasingly popular with Washington growers since Columbia Winery established a fine reputation for its bottling from Red Willow Vineyard in the late 1980s. But it is now bring joined by other Rhône varieties such as red Mourvèdre and the relatively obscure Counoise plus white Roussanne and Viognier, of which there were at least a dozen examples at Taste Washington.

It was Merlot which, with justification, forged Washington state’s reputation for lively reds and it is hardly Washington’s fault that the varietal’s reputation has been tarnished by the dire quality of California’s most cynical examples. Washington can also boast several wineries with longstanding reputations for their Cabernets or Bordeaux blends.

But the Washington picture is increasingly diverse – not just varietally but geographically. There has long been a cluster of small wineries in western Washington dependent on the much damper, smaller vineyards west of the Cascades, indeed west of Seattle, coping with conditions not unlike those in England. But vines are now being planted around Lake Chalan, a coolish but dry area which should add lustre, and perhaps some useful competition, to the well-established vineyards of eastern Washington.