Refreshing recycling

The owners of Davenlore Winery in Prosser, Washington understand one of the basic truths of wine – it’s all about making friends. Gordon Taylor and his wife Joan Davenport both have a background in agriculturally related sciences (she is a soil researcher at Washington State University, he is a process engineer with a background in fruit juice production), and they bottle some lovely wines at their winery in the hills overlooking Prosser. Like all small producers, they face the challenge of moving those wines into the consumers’ hands. You can do this a couple of different ways – through a tasting room, for example, or at wine festivals. Restaurant sales account for a lot of Davenlore’s distribution. Look for their wines at local restaurants like Tuscany Italian Bistro and Picazo 7Seventeen.

Davenlore staff happily sells

Recovery Red in reusable

bottles at area farmers markets.

But one of the best ways to drink Davenlore Wines is from the refillable bottles Gordon sells at local farmer’s markets. Yep, refillable. From May through October, you can find him at the markets in Prosser and nearby Richland, where he sells a full array of Davenlore wines, including Recovery Red, a value-priced blend sold in reusable bottles. The first bottle costs around $20. Take it home, drink it, clean the bottle, then return to the farmers market the next week to trade the empty bottle for a new one, for about half the price. You can also replace it at Davenlore’s tasting room.  The blend is also available in a traditional bottle for $15.

There are a lot of fun things about this kind of marketing. The recyclable bottles are interesting – different, without the questionable aura surrounding boxed wines, for example. And of course, they are eco-friendly. But mostly it’s a kick to chat with Gordon. Getting to know your winemaker in a down-to-earth setting like a farmers market is just plain nice.

Taylor's big red wines carry discernible oak balancing the fruit flavors. He and Davenport tend a tiny vineyard at their property, but they source most of their fruit from the Horse Heaven Hills, including the Alder Ridge, Zephyr Canyon and Double Canyon vineyards, where Taylor finds the hefty tannins and structure he loves, along with good fruit integration. But he’s equally as excited about his dry Riesling, a German-style wine with no residual sugars.

Recovery Red is the only wine Davenlore sells in the reusable bottles, but their list includes a wide array of varieties, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Merlot, Durif (also known as Petite Syrah, a variety not related to Syrah) and Riesling, along with a Syrah port and another blend called Red Tale.

It's all about the blends

Bunnell Family Cellar bottled its first vintage in 2004, but the expertise behind the labels has been a force in Washington wines for a long time. Ron Bunnell served as winemaker at Chateau Ste. Michelle for many years before opening his own boutique winery in Prosser, after stints at other industry giants like Kendall Jackson and Beringer. And the expertise he honed over the years making huge quantities of wines for big corporations translates nicely at his hands-on venture. Bunnell makes around 250 cases of each wine he bottles, for a total production in the neighborhood of 6,000 cases.

You can taste Bunnell Family Cellar wines, along with RiverAerie, their second label, at the tasting room inside the Bunnells’ other venture, the Wine O’Clock Wine Bar, in Prosser’s Vintner’s Village. But I’d recommend instead that you spend a little money for a tasty lunch and a flight of Bunnell’s Rhone blends. Ron’s wife Susan and chef Laurie Kennedy create delightful artisan pizzas, cooked in a wood-fired oven and served up in a lovely dining room or on the patio, where you can enjoy beautiful views of the Horse Heaven Hills. Order a flight of wines to accompany your lunch, then sit back and enjoy some of the only food available in the Village, while making a relaxed comparison between some of Bunnell’s fabulous blends.

I recently spent a lovely summer afternoon there with two of my favorite people. We shared a pizza, and a flight of the Rhone Chorus – three blends, including Lia (50% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 10% Cinsault, Mourvedre and Petite Sirah), á Pic (52% Syrah, 18% Cinsault, 18% Mourvedre, and 12% Grenache), and Vif (60 % Syrah, 30% Mourvedre, and 10% Petit Verdot). Notice any similarities? Overlapping contents create a category for these wines. But don’t be fooled into thinking the similarity between the blends dominates. Each highlights different qualities, ranging from the softness of Lia to the spicy fruits of Vif. My favorite – á Pic, with its rich toasty aromas and flavors of dark fruit and mocha.
 But, as always, the best part of the wines was the discovery, an afternoon spent under warm sunshine, enjoying two of my favorite people, and sipping delicious wines.

MMMM, Mourvedre…


That was the thought rolling around my head when I woke up this morning.

That, and dang, it’s tough to land back on Planet Earth after a weekend in Wine Heaven.

I just returned from the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla, two-and-a-half days spent with 300 other wine-lovers and winemakers (plus a few winemaker lovers) in a near-constant state of sensory overload. Not that that’s a bad thing. The organizers, hosts and sponsors did a bang-up job of giving us an up-close look at the best offerings from this beautiful little valley in Eastern Washington. The weekend started off with a dazzling array of wines poured for tasting, along with a lunch provided by a selection of taco truck vendors from Yakima. Delicious. We continued on with lots of breakout sessions devoted to our craft of writing and blogging, nurtured all the way with extraordinary wines and food. Vintages from every corner of the globe dribbled into my glass (Australia’s Mollydooker Velvet Glove, Spain’s Rias Baixas Albarino, and Chile’s Ledya Pinot Noir, for example), but the food stayed gloriously closer to home. Chef Bear Ullman at Walla Walla’s Marcus Whitman Hotel, along with his staff, put on a great show, culminating with a wine-and-food pairing on the final day that left me feeling glad to be alive, and so very happy to be writing about wines and all good things about them. Take a look at some of his fabulous offerings, like Tillia Torrontes 2009 Mendoza, Argentina with phylo bouchee with monteillet chevre, pistachio and chestnut honey:

Or High Note Malbec 2009 Uco Valley, Argentina served with  cherry scented duck confit empanadas with mole and avocado:

But back to Mourvedre. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, wine is all about discovery. Some of the most memorable moments of my weekend were wrapped around sips of Mourvedre, an uncommon bottling but one well worth seeking out. The first was a 2006 Yakima Valley Mourvedre from Trio Vintners, an up-and-coming boutique winery that specializes in offbeat varietals. Winemakers and owners Denise Slattery and Steve Michener (above)  focus on food-friendly grapes like Tempranillo, Zinfandel, Sangiovese and (mmmm) Mourvedre. This wine spent 20 months in the barrel before Trio released it. With stats like that you’d expect to taste a big hit of oakiness, but the Trio crew blends their oaks with as much care as they do their wines. This vintage was exposed to a mix of new Hungarian, second- and third-year American, and neutral French oak, leaving plenty of room for the fruit to shine through. It’s deep, rich and foresty, perfect for a big, hearty, beefy meal.

My second Mourvedre moment came during an hour akin to speed dating. We got our hearts pumping during a live blogging session, where winemakers raced around the Marcus Whitman’s ballroom, pouring their wines at tables filled with bloggers, telling us all about themselves and their wines in a mere five minutes before scurrying off to the next group. And this Mourvedre was all about discovery. It was poured not by winemakers, but by a couple of tech guys who have developed an iPhone app called AOC Travel Guides, a clever little insider’s view of four different wine regions (Napa Valley/Carneros, Sonoma County/Russian River, Willamette Valley, and Yakima Valley/Red Mountain). They showed up at our live blogging table with a mystery bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. They pitched their app and poured the wine – and we all sat up and took notice. I swirled the wine and buried my nose inside the glass and was slammed with aromas of ….s’mores. Toasty, smoky, cocoa-laden s’mores. I fell in love. And when they asked us to guess which of their four wine regions gave birth to the mystery wine, we all failed the test. The big rich flavors made me guess Red Mountain. The correct answer was the Russian River. The wine was Sunce Winery’s 2008 Mourvedre. The winery’s web site says this wine is completely sold out, which makes me sad. Still, I’ll remember it always, an intriguing stranger I once flirted with in a frenzied, exciting, blurry moment in Walla Walla.

Lost and found
Wine is all about discovery. I’m not saying it’s normal, but some of my earliest wine experiences involved a green bottle in the back seat of a ’68 Mustang. If you had a similar start, then you too probably have delicious memories of your first taste of a really great wine. Mine was a bottle of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon (sadly, I don’t remember whose), served with our 1990 Christmas beef Wellington. I’m not suggesting that it changed my life or anything, but it certainly opened my eyes to greater possibilities. I’d long since moved beyond Annie Greensprings, of course, but tasting that Cab was like discovering a whole new planet.

So imagine how exciting it must have been for Dean Morrison when he planted a small plot of Carmenere, the “lost grape” of Bordeaux, in his Walla Walla Valley vineyard, making him one of only a handful of Washington growers supplying this grape. Carmenere virtually disappeared from France in the late 19th century, a victim of the phylloxera infestation that wiped out nearly all of France’s vineyards. Fortunately, it was part of an earlier diaspora of French grapes to South America, where it thrived in Chilean vineyards alongside the better-known Merlot. Eventually, it became so entwined there with Merlot that it lost its identity entirely, and was mistaken over the years for a Merlot clone. It wasn’t until 1994 that researcher Jean Michael Bousiquot positively identified a vine in Chile as Carmenere. Voila. The lost grape lived again.

Morrison leapt on it with glee. He’s sort of a contrarian when it comes to wine grapes. His 23-acre Walla Walla vineyard includes plantings of relatively obscure varieties like Dolcetto, Barbera and Nebbiolo, all native to Italy’s Piedmont region, along with Viognier, Cinsault, and Sangiovese. Morrison in 1999 was also the first in Washington to plant Counoise.  His son Dan transforms these varieties into some lovely wines at the family's Walla Walla winery.

All of these grapes fall into a category growers call “sport varieties,” grapes that are traditionally blended to enhance the more robust traits of Cabernet or Merlot. Syrah was once part of this group, although in the last decade it has become ubiquitous on wine lists. Similarly, Washington State Viognier has taken off running.

But Carmenere remains elusive. It’s still used primarily as a blending grape, but it occasionally shows up on shelves as a varietal. My local wine vender stocks a Chilean bottle from Peralillo Winery called Arenal, and it makes a very nice little everyday wine, especially refreshing when you’re looking for a change from Cabernet or Merlot. And just the other night we enjoyed a pleasant bottle of 2008 Casillero Del Diablo Carmenere from Concha y Toro. (“Chile’s very own grape,” according to the label.) But the 2005 Carmenere from Morrison Lane is a lot more interesting, with earthy notes wound around tastes of plums, and a bit of spice as well.

“I was attracted to it because of its rarity,” Morrison laughs. “It was made for a guy like me.” Besides his own winery, his vineyard supplies other producers in the Walla Walla area, as well, including Seven Hills, where winemaker Casey McClellan has produced a couple vintages of Carmenere.

McClellan likes to experiment with different varieties, and after he encountered a bottle of Carmenere at a tasting in Bordeaux ten years ago, he decided to give it a whirl. Carmenere can be like a spicy Merlot, he said, but with a softer body. It’s a bigger grape, and more exposure to the skins gives the wine a more accessible structure than some of its bigger cousins. Seven Hills’ Carmenere is full of red raspberry flavors, white pepper and herbs like tarragon and chervil.

McClellan has had fun with the Carmenere, and he plans to continue making it. “I like to offer something a little different. People seem to enjoy a medium-bodied wine with some exotic notes to it,” he says. But he bottles less than 100 cases, and most of that is sold through the Seven Hills wine club or at the winery. Is it worth the trip? You’ll have to try it to decide. Remember, wine is all about discovery.

High on Red Mountain

There’s no better place to start at Red Mountain than at the top. Hightower Cellars operates out of a snug little tasting room and winemaking facility perched above a ten-acre vineyard, nearly at the crest of Red Mountain. The views from the patio sweep down the hill and across the valley to the north face of the Horse Heaven Hills, and give you the feeling of soaring above it all. It’s a lovely spot. Tim and Kelly Hightower chose it eight years ago, when they moved their winery from Seattle across the mountains, right to the source.

The Hightowers targeted Red Mountain fruit from their earliest vintage, in 1997. Their wines show off the earthy, brambly characteristics of the mountain, with rich black fruit flavors, and soft tannins balanced by an acidic structure. They use a soft touch when making their wines, hand-sorting, destemming and crushing the grapes directly above open-top fermenters, minimizing the tannins from broken seeds or skins. They hand-punch the must several times during fermentation, and siphon the free-run juice directly into barrels. The rest they pour gently into an air-diaphragm press. As the pressure slowly increases, to as much as 15 psi, they taste the juice until the astringency hits the limit of the tannins they want in their wines. The rest – sometimes as much as 25 percent of the juice – goes down the drain. Twenty months or so of oak, and voila… elegant, complex and delightfully balanced wines.

Most of their fruit is still sourced from Red Mountain, although they continue to blend grapes from notable vineyards like Pepperbridge in Walla Walla and Alder Ridge in the Horse Heaven Hills. But as their estate vineyard matures, more and more of it is showing up in their bottles. Most of the fruit finds its way into their Murray Cuvee, a welcoming and approachable blend named for their dog. In fact, the 2007 Murray is 100 percent estate wine. And with the 2008 vintage they bottled their first estate Syrah. They priced it at $20, putting it in the same entry-level category as the Murray Cuvee, a move that turned out to be brilliant in the tough economy of the last two years. Many wineries, especially those (like Hightower) focusing on higher price points, suffered huge hits during the recession. Kelly reports that Hightower Cellars’ sales stayed level, even though their volume increased. Apparently their fans were happy to stock up on Murray Cuvee, and experiment with the Syrah at the same time.

The Hightowers opened a new tasting room at the winery a few years ago, making it easier to keep regular hours for the public. And that’s important. Hightower produces a bare 2,200 cases of wine a year, and sells a lot of it to select restaurants in the Seattle area, including El Gaucho, Boat Street and Lola’s. It’s available in retail outlets around the Northwest, as well as in Arizona and New York. The remainder is sold at the winery, and it’s well worth the trip to get them. Prices range from $20 for the Murray Cuvee and Murray Syrah up to $50 for the Red Mountain Blend.

Veggie tales

It’s asparagus season in Eastern Washington. This is truly a cause for celebration. There is no finer vegetable than a tender, slender stalk of asparagus. Throughout spring and early summer we eat it almost every day. I buy it fresh at the local farmer’s stand, just hours out of the ground, and store it upright in a vase with an inch or two of water. It actually makes a lovely bouquet, and reminds me all day how lucky we are to live in such bountiful corner of the world.

I learned how to cook asparagus from my mother. She taught me one way and one way only to prepare it. First, you break off the tough end of each individual stalk by grasping it in two hands and gently bending it until you find the sweet spot, where it easily snaps; too flexible and you’re trying to break off the tender, tasty part, too rigid and you haven’t eliminated enough of the woody base. Then you toss it in a sauté pan with an inch or so of water, cover it and steam it on the stove top for three to five minutes, until the asparagus is bright green, tender and flavorful. Mom always added butter to her vegetables. I throw in a little lemon juice along with it. Delicious.
However, as in so many areas of life, it turns out there is more than one way to cook asparagus. I have several friends who drizzle it with olive oil and a little garlic, roast it in the oven or on a grill, and sprinkle it with freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese. This is delicious, and it sounds simple, doesn’t it? But I screw it up every time. I always seem to end up with the charred and shriveled remnants of my fresh pick. I’m much safer steaming, but even that method can be adapted and changed. I love asparagus cold – steamed for just three minutes, until it’s still a little crisp, then plunged into icy water to stop the cooking process. Served with a dip of mayonnaise and lemon juice, it disappears in a blink of an eye.
Another favorite around these parts is pickled asparagus. This, too, is delicious, and many people pickle their own, although I’m not a big enough fan to take on a project like that. The brine adds a nice little zing, and it’s a tasty way to eat asparagus all year long, but I don’t love it enough to put that kind of time into it. Besides, there are lots and lots of local producers who sell pickled asparagus. You’ll find it at many wineries in their tasting rooms, and at specialty food shops all over the Northwest.
My latest asparagus experiment was a huge success, and extremely simple. But it took me a little while to work up the nerve to try it. Remember, I was raised to believe there is one way and one way only to prepare asparagus, so naturally it follows that there is only one way to eat it – with a thick steak, some fresh-baked crusty bread and a hearty glass of Cabernet. It’s comfort food. Anything else is kind of, well, crazy. But it is spring, the winds are blowing around the hills, tugging caution and the habits of years along with them, and somehow making me a little adventurous. So the other night I took a fresh bunch of asparagus, trimmed each stalk by hand and used my favorite method of steaming, but instead of my old stand-by of lemon butter, I boldly tossed the shoots with some hot chili sesame oil, then sprinkled them with sesame seeds for extra flavor. Delicious, a spicy alternative to the usual, and really tasty paired with garlic shrimp, angel hair pasta and a lovely white wine.

And that’s the really wild part – the wine. I am a red-meat-loving, red-wine-drinking kind of girl. I don’t dislike white wines, per se, but I usually find myself working to finish a glass. But the spicy asparagus dish along with shrimp just screamed for a lighter bottle, so I pulled out a Chateau de l’Aulnaye Muscadet Sevre et Maine, a gift from a French friend who spends a lot of time trying to convince me that French wines outshine our Washington vintages. In a head-to-head tasting between this bottle and a Washington Viognier, I don’t know which would prevail, and it doesn’t really matter. I get tired, so very tired, of reading commentaries on wine that try to pit one style against another. I don’t think a smack-down between regions or countries or even varieties does anything good for wine. But I do know that the Muscadet was delightful. The pineapple and citrus flavors were gentle, smooth and soft, probably enhanced by the low alcohol content of only 12 percent. It made a very pleasant backdrop to a delicious meal. And isn’t that what wine is supposed to do? So for this meal, vive la France. And in the future, I’ll be sipping whites with a whole new outlook.

Where to begin?


The wine business is a funny critter. It’s not enough to make a great product. You also have to sell it, and that’s not as easy as one might think. Friendly people who love to drink wine are plentiful. Getting them to your bottle is another story.



That’s why wine makers spend so much time and energy on their tasting rooms. Many of the finest vintners around specialize in small lots of handcrafted wines, and their products aren’t readily available in retail outlets. They depend on face-to-face relationships with their customers. That often means personally delivering cases of wines to select restaurants or wine shops, but it also means getting to personally know their fans.


Many of Washington’s finest wines are found only at the source, so wine tasting here is big business. But with around 600 wineries in Washington state, you have to choose a starting point. Woodinville and the Seattle area are buzzing, and lots of wineries open tasting rooms there to take advantage of the tourism infrastructure. With plenty of hotels and restaurants, Woodinville is a great place to start on a tour of Washington’s finest tasting rooms. But if you’d rather discover wines where they’re made, or at least near the vineyards that give them life, you’re going to have to work a little harder.

Take Red Mountain, for example. This tiny AVA (around 4,000 acres total, with only 700 under production) is one of Washington’s smallest. But its wines are tremendous. Huge. Gorgeous, powerful, awe-inspiring. And, by some measures, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. You gotta come.


Red Mountain juts 5,890 feet out of the dusty, arid landscape of eastern Washington. It lies 207 miles east of Seattle, 66 miles east of Yakima, and 14 miles west of Richland. The nearest burg is Benton City, population 2,964, home of a few small restaurants, a print shop or two, a nursery, a few orchards, and not much else. The mountain is dotted with small homes and acreages scattered among stretches of still-undeveloped desert, and seven or eight wineries that call it home, including such stellar producers as Fidelitas, Col Solare, Hedges Cellars and Terra Blanca. Kiona Vineyards reigns as one of the oldest producers in the area, and newcomers like Hightower Cellars and Taptiel Vineyards are turning heads with some blockbuster vintages. With only a handful of wineries there, you can tour Red Mountain in a day or maybe two, depending on how much you want to concentrate into the experience. Washington winemakers pride themselves on the down-to-earth experience you’ll get at their tasting rooms. You won’t always find the winemaker on premise (Fidelitas owner Charlie Hoppes, for example, shares his talents as a consulting winemaker with a long list of Washington producers, and he can be hard to pin down) but knowledgeable staff in the tasting rooms have a wealth of information to share. Weekends are your best bet – Hightower and Taptiel, for example, have limited hours in their tasting rooms, as does Hedges Cellars.


And don’t let the isolated location dissuade you. The nearby Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick comprise a healthy metropolitan area of some 120,000 people, with plenty of hotels. The restaurant scene leans heavily toward national chains, but a few spots offer some interesting atmosphere and dining. Carmine’s, in Kennewick, serves homestyle Italian dinners and is a local favorite. Monterossa’s, housed in a railroad car incongruously parked in a city parking lot in Richland, features delicious and original pastas, along with a nice wine list. And Anthony’s, hugging the shore of the Columbia River in a building designed to take full advantage of the views, serves a deep menu of fresh seafood.


But the real excitement is on the mountain. It’s a great starting point for some of Washington’s finest wines.