Washington 2025 Tasting Report: Winemaking Without Compromise

A Toyota Camry rental car was no match for the rugged terrain of the vast Horse Heaven Hills AVA in Washington State. It had to be abandoned for the much sturdier SUV of Dan Nickolaus, the vineyard manager for Quilceda Creek, who skilfully edged down the steep, winding and rocky path toward Mach One Vineyard earlier this month.

“This is one of the most unique vineyards in the state with extreme growing conditions,” said Nickolaus, speaking about the stunning Mach One – a south-facing, isolated site right on the edge of the Columbia River. “Nothing about this site is easy!”

Horse Heaven Hills is a sprawling appellation of 17,000 acres under vine – about a third of the state’s total plantings – spread over 600,000 acres. Plantings range from production-oriented farms to super-premium vineyards like Mach One and Champoux, which produce some of the most expensive fruit in the state.

Mach One Vineyard: A Look at Extreme Cabernet

Horse Heaven Hills is much less accessible than areas like Walla Walla or Red Mountain and, perhaps for that reason, it hasn’t received the same recognition, but it’s where fruit is sourced for some of the best wines in Washington.

One of these, the Quilceda Creek Horse Heaven Hills Tchelistcheff 2022, is among the best cabernet sauvignons we have ever tasted from the state, showing remarkable depth, structure and power. It’s a single-clone (clone 412) bottling from Mach One Vineyard that is dark-fruited with an earthy, savory complexity. Despite a massive tannin frame, it remains velvety in texture.

“We get tiny berries, not much juice, with lots of color,” said Nickolaus, explaining that the vineyard sometimes experiences ferocious winds coming off the Columbia Gorge. The exposure to sun, warm rocky soils and wind, combined with low yields and meticulous farming, produces concentrated, thick-skinned grapes, even in a cooler year like 2022. Quilceda Creek owner Paul Golitzin said that their yields from the cool 2022 season were intentionally restricted and were similar to those of 2021, the hottest season on record.

Horse Heaven Hills is often replaced on labels by the broader Columbia Valley AVA, such as with the silky and classy Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley 2022, a blend of Champoux and Mach One fruit that is also one of the top 10 wines in this report.

And while there are large, volume-driven plantings across the AVA that are now being pulled out – one of the fallouts of the downsizing of Washington’s biggest winery, Chateau Ste Michelle – the best cabernet sauvignon wines from Horse Heaven Hills are of superb quality, showing a ripeness and concentration equal to the wines from Red Mountain, but with silkier, more refined tannins.

We reviewed more than 700 wines during a 10-day trip to Washington, the second largest wine-producing state in the U.S. after California. Our tastings focused on the 2022 vintage (60 percent of tastings), which was the coolest year in a decade with a long, Indian summer that extended the season, allowing extra hang time for fruit to ripen. Grapes were picked on average two to three weeks later than usual.

The only other Washington wine we rated as highly as the Quilceda Creek Tchelistcheff 2022 is the Cayuse Vineyards Syrah Walla Walla Bionic Frog 2022. We continue to find greatness in the wines from the Walla Walla Valley, more so for Rhone varieties like syrah, and the Bionic Frog is a beautiful example. It’s from a slightly higher elevation site in the Walla Walla Valley and it’s aromatically and texturally distinctive, exhibiting amazingly spicy aromas of curry powder, roasted almonds and strawberries that build in intensity, and is also supple and round on the palate.

“There’s a lot of power in 2022,” said resident vigneronne Karin Gasparotti, with whom Associate Editor Andrii Stetsiuk and I tasted the 38-wine portfolio of Christophe Baron’s Bionic Wines, which includes Cayuse Vineyards, Horsepower Vineyards, No Girls, Hors Categorie and La Rata. “The wines are ripe, but not overly so. It’s a ripe and balanced vintage with tension.”

Two more syrahs stood out for us this year. Also from Walla Walla Valley is the intensely mineral and earthy Hors Categorie Syrah 2022. It shows tarry aromas like scorched earth and graphite and, like all of Baron’s wines, it’s made from biodynamically grown grapes. Meanwhile from the Yakima Valley towards the west, the K Vintners Syrah Motor City Kitty 2022 wowed us once again with its complexity and persistency, exhibiting more wild-berry, white-pepper and cured-meat aromas.

“I think Washington state is in a great spot for all Rhone varietals,” said Charles Smith, the owner of K Vintners. “You get freshness, perfume, mouthfeel and a bit of restraint.”

Equally impressive is their Walla Walla grenache, the K Vintners The Boy 2022, which is wonderfully aromatic, peppery and salty, with mouthwatering freshness and an ethereal quality. While varietal grenache bottlings made up less than five percent of our tastings, it clearly thrives in eastern Washington, with another – the outlandishly spicy and peppery Horsepower Grenache Walla Walla Valley Fiddleneck Vineyard 2022 – among our top 10 wines.

We tasted more than 100 wines from the small Red Mountain AVA and spent a couple of days there, tasting with and talking to a dozen producers and growers. The vineyards are mainly south-facing, ranging from almost flat at the bottom to very steep, rocky sites near the top that are interspersed with lavender and sage bushes, extending into the WeatherEye vineyard that falls outside of the AVA demarcation around the top of the hill. Varying soil types from an ancient flood result in differences in fruit expression (mainly cabernet sauvignon) between neighboring vineyards, but the wines are full-bodied, powerful and structured across the board, often with very firm tannins.

Winemakers agreed that 2022 was an excellent vintage for Red Mountain because of the later harvest, which allowed the fruit to gain complexity and phenolic ripeness at lower sugar (and subsequently alcohol) levels.

“It’s just warmer in general and because of crazy winds, the skins are super tough,” said Stephanie Cohen, the winemaker at Col Solare, which is now fully owned by Tuscany’s Marchesi Antinori (previously a joint venture with Chateau Ste Michelle). “We're trying to encourage bigger canopies than normal … to extend the growing season in our vineyard. That's what made the tannins so special in 2022.”

After the Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Red Mountain Galitzine Vineyard 2022, we rated half of the Red Mountain wines in the 93- to 95-point range, denoting excellence, with great offerings from Col Solare, Force Majeure, Canvasback, Upchurch and Delille Cellars in particular. What’s special about the AVA is the esteem of the vineyard growers, with many vineyard-designated wines showcasing names like Quintessence and Heart of the Hill. Aside from the Galitzine, though, we found more of the “wow” factor in wines from other AVAs like Walla Walla, Horse Heaven Hills and Wahluke Slope.

The highest-rated wines in this report demonstrate just how difficult it is to confine Washington to a single wine type. Both cabernet sauvignon-led, Bordeaux-style reds and Rhone varietals continue to impress us, with producers like Figgins, Leonetti Cellars and Delmas rounding out the top 20 wines, alongside Quilceda Creek, K Vintners and Horsepower. Check out the new bottling of Delmas Walla Walla B|D|R 2022, our highest-rated Rhone-style blend (syrah and grenache, with small amounts of cinsaut and viognier) from the Rocks district in Walla Walla. It’s distinctively salty, peppery and savory, with silky tannins and a very bright, long finish.

“I think the elegance is the vintage and the cinsaut” in the blend, said winemaker Brooke Delmas Robertson. "These are lower-alcohol wines, more like the 2011 vintage, which for us was long and cool as well," she added, referring to the weather of 2022. “It’s lovely, elegant and lengthy, different to what we've been used to, especially coming off of 2021,” which was hot and low-yielding.

Delmas also produced the best white from the state that we tasted. The Delmas Viognier Walla Walla Valley 2023 – one of just over 300 from the vintage included in tasting notes below – is concentrated, exotic and full-bodied, with plenty of structure and weight from skin contact before fermentation, plus frequent batonnage during 14 months of maturation in oak.

Robertson said that 2023 “was more of what a normal year would be." Across the state, normal yields and consistent heat units contrasted to the cool and higher-yielding 2022, the hot and low-yielding 2021, and the smoke-challenged 2020 seasons. More 2023s will be released and tasted next year.

While the acreage under vine is decreasing both statewide and nationwide, many winemakers remain optimistic about the future of wine in Washington, anticipating a shift toward smaller, premium-focused wineries after the decades-long monopoly of Chateau Ste Michelle. The best producers are sparing no expense in their goal of making great wines, starting in the vineyard.

“It’s extreme wine growing – it takes a lot of time and maintenance,” said vineyard manager Nickolaus, pointing to the small plots of perfectly pruned and oriented cabernet sauvignon vines in the Mach One vineyard. To make the best wine, he said, “no expenses are spared and we do everything without compromise.”

– Claire Nesbitt, Staff Writer & Critic

Note: The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. You can sort the wines below by vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.