A New Gold in the West
WALLA WALLA, Wash.--It was hard not to feel sorry for the poor vines. Their thin trunks rose bravely from a bed of rounded cobblestones. The rocks were hot to the touch and radiated heat up into the sparse canopies where a few, small bunches of grapes hung. There was hardly any soil in evidence. Looking into a nearby backhoe pit, I could see what was under the rocks, down in the rooting zone: more rocks.
“These vines are stressed,” winemaker Christophe Baron said with grim delight. His vineyard foreman, Ramon Alcala, nodded in agreement.
“They really have to struggle here,” Alcala said admiringly.
Time for a reality check. Were we in an old vineyard in the northern Rhone, or California or Australia? No, we were in the Walla Walla Valley, in southeast Washington. The Syrah vines around us were planted barely five years ago, but they are already gaining fame in the wine world for the regally dark, aromatic wines that Baron makes from their fruit under his Cayuse Vineyards label.
Wine has conferred a new touch of glamour on this old farming community. Walla Walla has long been famous for its sweet onions, along with apples, hops and the singsong name that brings out the kid in everyone. But just in the last dozen years or so its bold Merlots and Cabernets have become sought-after trophies for wine collectors.
And in the last few vintages it has become evident that Syrah is even better suited to the climate and landscape than its Bordeaux cousins, and may well give the clearest expression yet of Walla Walla terroir. They’re already being priced at $30 to $60 a bottle, but--for the moment, at least--they’re more readily available than the cult clarets.
Standing in the midst of Baron’s vines, I was surrounded by one of the oddest agricultural landscapes in the country. There were plenty of shade trees, orchards and barns--but all around the storybook farm scene rose a fantastic landscape of tawny, purple-shaded plateaus and cliffs that looked like the backdrop for a science-fiction movie set in the deep Pleistocene.
I could almost imagine that the giant pieces of farm equipment moving through distant wheat fields were dinosaurs. But in the foreground, that primordial illusion gave way to orderly rows of grapevines covering pillow-like hills.
A Fast Grower
The modern Walla Walla wine industry is just two decades old, and still small, but it’s quickly building Napa-like momentum on the success of producers such as Cayuse, Leonetti Cellar, Glen Fiona, L’Ecole No. 41, Canoe Ridge, Seven Hills and Woodward Canyon.
The first modern vineyards were planted in the mid-1970s by Gary Figgins, whose Leonetti Cellar subsequently achieved cult-like status with intense, structured Bordeaux-style reds. That recognition led to the establishment of Walla Walla Valley as Washington’s second American Viticultural Area in 1984, with just four wineries and 60 acres of vines.
The Walla Walla Valley AVA took its time developing. By 1990 there were still only six wineries and 100 acres of vines in the valley. But a new wave of producers arrived in force during the mid-’90s, and within a few years there were three dozen wineries and 1,200 acres of vines. Last year the AVA boundaries were expanded to accommodate the rapid growth.
In the midst of all that, Syrah made a quiet but forceful entrance. The first Syrah was planted in ’95 by Rusty Figgins (Gary’s younger brother), whose Glen Fiona winery is devoted to Rhone varietals. Within a few years Syrah acreage surpassed every other grape except Cabernet Sauvignon.
Fine Southern Soil
The best Walla Walla vineyards, such as Baron’s rocky Cailloux site and the Seven Hills Vineyard in which Figgins is a partner, are in the lee of the Blue Mountains on the southern side of the appellation.
The pillowy contours in that area in part explain the distinctive character of Walla Walla wines. They are raised beds of layered soils deposited by repeated cataclysmic flooding over thousands of years.
The soil components range in size from large cobbles and chunks of lava rock, such as those in Baron’s vineyard, to tiny, polished particles so uniform in size they resemble microscopic marbles. Such warm, well-drained soils are ideal for vines.
Another key component is a climate of extremes. The warm, fog-free summers discourage vine diseases, while the bitterly cold winters keep bugs in check.
The seasonal contrast is mirrored on a daily basis throughout the growing season by a wide fluctuation between day and night temperatures, which lets grapes ripen fully without losing acidity. And the region’s high latitude confers up to two hours more sunlight each day than California vineyards get.
Finally, eastern Washington is one of the few wine regions in the world where wine grapes grow on their own roots. Because phylloxera (a root-eating aphid) doesn’t thrive in soils with low clay content, Washington growers don’t have to graft their vines onto resistant rootstock.
Whether these vines yield finer wine than grafted vines is a perennial debate among wine lovers, but the practical advantages are undeniable. Among other things, they bear fruit up to two years earlier and they recover more quickly from a trauma such as hard freezing.
That’s important, because the one serious problem faced by eastern Washington grape growers is the periodic cold snap.
“Our only real problem is hard winters,” said Marty Clubb, L’Ecole No. 41 partner-winemaker and a partner with Rusty Figgins in Seven Hills Vineyard. “We don’t have phylloxera or Pierce’s disease, or the other pests that plague most regions. And rainfall is low so we don’t have mildew pressure. But those subzero systems from the Arctic can kill a lot of vines.”
Walla Walla’s budding 19th century wine industry was wiped out by a series of such freezes, and a mid-20th century revival met the same fate in the infamous freeze of 1956.
Another hard freeze in 1996 gave Syrah a chance to show its Washingtonian mettle.
“It was way below zero for five days in a row,” said Clubb. “We had to chain-saw acres of Cabernet and Merlot vines right to the ground.”
Most of the Syrah came through.
A Real Walla Walla-ness
The distinctive character of Walla Walla Syrah is displayed in L’Ecole No. 41’s sleek Seven Hills Vineyard ’00. Its spicy perfume and deep, juicy flavor are as impressive as the best wines from the Rhone and South Australia, and yet there’s a real Walla Walla-ness in its balance of succulence and power.
That succulence also informs the Glen Fiona ‘99, a high-toned beauty with rich, spicy berry flavors and fine-boned structure. Winemaker Rusty Figgins enhanced the signal tenderness by co-fermenting with 10% Viognier.
Other facets of that character are presented by several different Cayuse Vineyards bottlings from Baron’s nobly struggling vines. The Cailloux Vineyard ’99 (“cailloux” is French for stones; it was early French trappers who named the area’s now-vanished native tribe the Cayuse) has a dense, heady perfume that shows the meatiness of concentrated Syrah with amazingly crystal-clear flavors of spicy black fruit. The Coccinelle Vineyard ’99 is brighter and more floral, with a peachy tang.
And then there’s the Bionic Frog. “It was my nickname when I was making wine in Australia,” confided Baron. “That’s how the Aussies show respect when you drink them under the table.” The Bionic Frog ‘00, also from the Coccinelle Vineyard, is a towering Syrah with black-rose color, deeply concentrated flavor and the warm, spicy perfume of a Cote Rotie--with the kind of chewy tannin and structure that Cote Rotie winemakers can only dream about.
Clearly, wines like these are just the beginning of good things to come. But they’re more than enough to send a clear challenge to California’s Rhone Rangers.
Saddle up, boys, you have some serious competition up north.