A few more words about wine…and Walla Walla

No cruising or complaining today. Just a quick update to finish up our trip to Walla Walla.

When last we spoke (or when last I wrote) we were with our friends Jayesh and Lisa setting out to taste wine all around Walla Walla, Washington. And taste wine we did. We spent the entire day on Thursday trying new wines and eating. Shame on us, but it was so good and so much fun. We started out at Castillo de Feliciana Vineyard and Winery which was actually in Oregon and not Washington (by about 100 yards). What a beautiful place (see my pics below) in its own way. Kathleen and I spent a wonderful hour or so trying their wine while Jayesh and Lisa had their “morning juice.”

Then after grabbing a couple of bottles of a wine that Feliciana had “found” in the cellar (a wonderful 2008 red blend) we headed back to Washington to taste some more. For those who are not wine tasting types, a note about how wine tasting works (I always wanted to know,…maybe you do too) the wineries charge to taste about five or six wines (somewhere between $8 and $15) and they waive the tasting charge if you buy any bottle or if you are a member of their wine club (more about that later). They pour you about an ounce of each of their wines, usually starting with the lightest white through the deepest red. You can split (as we did) a tasting. If you are the designated driver (as I was) you can sip the wine and spit it out (they have buckets for that) or you can pick and choose which wines to actually taste (which is what I did) and sip a tiny mouthful. I want to say that at no time during our three days of wine tasting did I ever feel impaired. The last thing the father-in-law of a WSP sergeant ever wants is a DUI. And many of you know my attitude about DUIs. Tougher laws are needed.

Getting down off my DUI soapbox, we were on to the next place, Dusted Valley Winery where we met a very nice young lady who told us all about the wine. One of the best benefits of doing this on a weekday was having very few other people doing tastings so we got to hear all about the wines, where they were grown, how they were blended. Totally boring if you aren’t into wine and but great if you are. It’s amazing to learn how and where the grapes were grown affects the taste and scent of the wine. As much as we liked the young lady we weren’t that impressed with the wine and moved on to our next place—Tranche Cellars. We had shared an amazing bottle of their wine the night before at dinner and I was really looking forward to trying others.

I was not disappointed and we left with both another two bottles and a membership in their wine club. What this means is that we joined a club at no charge and we will receive two shipments of wine every year until we tell them to stop. There is no charge to join, but we are charged (at a reduced rate from retail) for the wine. Since we loved their wine, we thought why not give the club a try. If we don’t end up liking what we get the first time, we can cancel it. This particular vineyard was just as beautiful as Feliciana in an entirely different way. After our tasting and our buying, we were off to one more before we called it quits for the day.

rocks Our last stop was Saviah Cellars where we got quite the education about a particular growing area called a terroir or AVA (An American Viticultural Area—AVA is a designated wine grape-growing region in the United States, providing an official appellation for the mutual benefit of wineries and consumers) known as The Rocks where grapes are literally grown in a pile of the rockiest soil you have ever seen. It produces (as Lisa says) a wine with a kind of a “funk” in the taste. It might be funky but I like it. Some really great Syrahs, (my favorite varietal of wine) so we had to buy two more bottles plus join their club as well. The woman doing the tasting turned out to be the mother of the very nice young lady we had met that morning at Dusted Valley. She was very knowledgable and we enjoyed talking to her and learning all about “The Rocks.”

There was another nearby winery we almost stopped in but we decided that at that point we were tasted out and needed both food and rest so it was back into Walla Walla for a quick bite. Before we had left I had read in an Eater.com post about a really cool restaurant inside a gas station convenience store and I really wanted to stop and try their food. It seemed like a really good place to catch a light (we were only 4 hours away from our dinner reservation) lunch. It’s called Andrae’s and it is really amazing food inside a Cenex station. Seriously! Check out their menu on their website here. We were trying to eat light so we each split a gyro but it came with fries…lots of fries. And really good fries too.

Lunch done, it was back to the AirBnB to rest, relax and download photos. Then dinner at Passtempo Restaurant (which while adequate, I can’t recommend as highly as I did Saffron the night before) and rest for the trip home.

That trip home was preceded by another early morning photo walk where I got some shots I really liked that are below, a great breakfast at the Maple Counter Cafe (known for their GIANT Dutch Baby pancakes) and a short drive to show Kathleen some of the old mansions I had found on my walks.

It’s about a five hour drive back to Redmond. On the way we made a stop in a town called Prosser for…what else? A wine tasting at 14 Hands Vineyards. We were home by 3:30. If you have not been, it’s worth a trip, especially if you love wine, which you now know we do.