Washington Annual Report: Overcoming a Wild Ride

It’s been a roller-coaster ride for Washington State grape growers and winemakers since the turn of the decade. The past four years have seen challenge after challenge: a global pandemic plus wildfire smoke in 2020, the hottest growing season in recent history in 2021 followed by the coolest season in a decade, and damaging winter freeze in January this year. That’s not to mention concerns in Washington’s grape-growing industry with news of a reduction of 40 percent of grower contracts by the state’s largest winery.

Top producers are nevertheless making better wines than ever, and the 15 that we spoke to last month in chilly Seattle and the eastern growing areas of Walla Walla and Red Mountain expressed resilience in the face of unpredictability. Of the 669 wines that Executive Editor Jim Gordon and I tasted for this year’s Washington report, 80 were rated 95 points or higher and only 6 percent received scores of less than 90.

Most of the wines we tasted were from 2021, one of the hottest growing seasons on record, according to winemakers we spoke to, with very low yields and a heat spike in late June that stressed the vines.

“The heat dome delayed some varieties like merlot and cabernet franc,” said Alex Stewart, the winemaker at Woodinville-based Matthews, referring to the phenomenon where hot weather is "trapped" in a region because of stationary high pressure conditions. Other producers we spoke to explained that the heat dome, which occurred early in the season, required growers to be more careful with irrigation and canopy management, although they added that the vines were able to recover and continue fruit development.

Paul Golitzin, the owner of Quilceda Creek in Snohomish, said their harvest was very early, compressed from a typical four-week process to under three weeks across their vineyards in the Columbia Valley. Despite these stressors, their pure cabernet sauvignon bottlings are the best that we have tasted, contrary to what might be expected from a “fast and furious” harvest. Golitzin described them as “opulent and flashy.”

The Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Horse Heaven Hills Tchelistcheff 2021 tops our report with a near-perfect score. It is concentrated, dark-fruited and savory, opulent but balanced, with fruit coming from own-rooted vines grown in a warm amphitheatre – the estate-owned Mach One Vineyard overlooking the Columbia River. Quilceda Creek’s three other pure 2021 cabernet sauvignons – Palengat, Galitzine and their Columbia Valley blend – are also standout bottlings of immense structure and concentration.

Walla Walla-based wineries Leonetti Cellar, Figgins and L’Ecole No 41 once again produced some of the highest-rated Bordeaux-style reds in this report, from an elegant and composed pure cabernet sauvignon, the Leonetti Serra Pedace Vineyard 2021, to their complex blend Loess 2021, alongside the concentrated Figgins Estate Red 2021 and L’Ecole No 41’s tightly-wound Ferguson Vineyard 2021.

They are joined this year by a newcomer, Dossier, which is also based in Walla Walla Valley, a stone’s throw from the Washington-Oregon border. We were most impressed with two of their highest tier “Reserve” wines from their inaugural 2021 vintage. The cabernet-led Halo Reserve Dissertation Red Blend 2021 and the Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley Halo Reserve 2021 show sophistication, intensity and elegance. Both are blends of top vineyards like Red Mountain AVA’s Ciel du Cheval “to bring in different aspects from all over Washington,” according to winemaker Billo Naravane.

STERLING SYRAH

Cabernet sauvignon is the leading variety by acreage in the state at just over a third of all plantings, and that was similarly reflected in our tastings. And yet year after year we find that syrah has a disproportionately high representation at the top level.

The iconic Cayuse Vineyards Bionic Frog is consistently one of the best syrahs in the United States, and the 2021 bottling is one of their finest. It’s aromatically explosive, with a distinct briny, peppery and savory quality that is a hallmark of wines from the Rocks District – an area with extraordinarily stony soils in Walla Walla Valley, where owner Christophe Baron was the first to plant vines in 1997.

“I think it's something about the soil, the stones,” said Elizabeth Boursier, Cayuse’s resident vigneronne. “We’re also on flat land and we don't get the kind of ripeness like other hotter parts of Columbia Valley.” That being said, Boursier thinks that the fruit "shows more in 2021.”

From another one of Baron’s projects under the Bionic Wines umbrella is the Hors Categorie Syrah Walla Walla Valley 2021, a firmer and more powerful rendition of syrah from grapes grown on a steep, higher-elevation site in the valley.

And check out the other Cayuse 2021 syrahs from Cailloux Vineyard, En Cerise Vineyard and En Chamberlin Vineyard, as well as Baron’s Horsepower wines, which are produced from vineyards worked entirely by horses. All of his wines are made from biodynamically grown grapes and, aside from Hors Categorie, hail from “the stones,” as Baron likes to call the Rocks District.

The wines made in a converted Dr. Pepper bottling plant in Seattle by House of Smith winemaker Brennon Leighton make an impression on us each year. The electric, savory and immensely long K Vintners Syrah Yakima Valley Motor City Kitty 2021 competes at the top of this report with the Bionic Frog, slapping your nostrils with aromas of tapenade, volcanic ash, tea leaves and green peppercorns. Leighton’s reductive winemaking style is discernible here as it is in his other K Vintner 2021 syrahs, like Royal City, Powerline Estate, The Beautiful, The Hidden and Phil Lane. All are energetic wines priced from $40 to $150.

Only three percent of our tastings were grenache, which makes it remarkable that three feature in the top 20 wines of this report. On par with the best syrahs is K Vintners’ The Boy 2021, a mouth-filling grenache combining red fruit and spice, blanketed in soft tannins. Two more stunning wines are the effusive and funky Cayuse Vineyards God Only Knows 2021, made mostly from grenache (the exact blend? God only knows) and the salty, savory Horsepower Grenache Fiddleneck Vineyard 2021.

18 percent of our tastings were white wines. We found some serious sauvignon blancs, such as Dossier’s Halo Reserve, and Rhone white varietals, like the intensely flavorful Delmas Viognier Walla Walla Valley 2021, which I tasted standing next to heaps of large, smooth stones – the Rocks – in their SJR vineyard. The honeysuckle, wild peach and aniseed aromas leaped out of the glass even in the bitingly cold February air.

Excellent chardonnays are also produced from cooler sites across the Columbia Valley. Our highest-rated white wine this year is the Sixto Chardonnay Moxee 2021. It’s generous, creamy and firmly balanced, made from 60-year-old vines at 1,500 feet elevation in the Columbia Valley and sells for just $55 a bottle.

READ MORE BUY NOW: WASHINGTON REDS

BATTLING OVERSUPPLY

The wines from Washington are, on average, supremely affordable compared with neighboring Oregon, at $17 and $11 respectively, reflecting a much lower average price of grapes. While this may mean fantastic value for consumers, there are question marks for the future of grape growing in the state. Last summer, Chateau Ste Michelle, by far the largest producer in the state, announced that it would reduce its fruit contracts with growers by 40 percent over the next five years.

“I think it will improve the wine quality as a whole across the region," said Katie Nelson, the vice president of winemaking at Chateau Ste. Michelle, who clarified the move as a strategic overall reduction to bring supply and demand back into balance.

Oversupply of vineyards appears to be a national issue, according to Silicon Valley Bank's "2024 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report." But because Chateau Ste. Michelle’s wineries produce close to 50 percent of all Washington wine, its struggles and strategic decisions have put Washington in the spotlight. I was told by multiple winemakers that while growers have been selling more to smaller wineries, Washington is now technically overplanted.

“We’re seeing positive and negative effects,” said Betz winemaker Louis Skinner. “There are more wine grapes now at every quality level than we’ve ever seen. But we also see growers cutting out vines. Most growers would not carry a crop all the way to the end of season not having someone take it.”

What does this mean for wine quality and wine price? Several winemakers we spoke to see the opportunity for small- to medium-sized wineries to purchase fruit, which may lead to an eventual adjustment from high volume wines to a greater focus on premium wines.

“It gives Washington a chance to redefine itself,” said Andrew Latta, the owner and winemaker of Latta Wines in Seattle. “There’s a little bit of a vacuum out there and opportunity for growth. It’s unfortunate [for growers], but it does open a lot of market for medium-sized brands to grow and expand, maybe to break out of the Pacific northwest.”

New quality-focused producers like Dossier and more ambitious winemaking at established wineries like Matthews, to which ex-Quilceda Creek winemakers Alex Stewart and Hal Iverson moved in 2021, have certainly given plenty of wine for thought. There is also continued investment in areas like Walla Walla Valley’s Rocks District, which has seen “insane growth in the last five years,” according to Boursier, as well as new vineyards at higher elevations.

Weathereye vineyard, for instance, sits atop Red Mountain, with plantings climbing to above 400 meters in elevation and continuing beyond the border of the AVA such that most of the wines are labeled as Columbia Valley. Standing midway up Red Mountain, I could see the first few rows of vines stretching up until they disappeared behind the ridge. Plantings on this extreme site only began in 2016, but we were impressed by the concentration and quality of the wines that we tasted.

“It’s remarkable,” Latta said of the Weathereye vineyard. “It’s an extreme and windy site and it keeps the acid in the fruit,” His inaugural syrah from Weathereye, the Piece 2020, is produced from four-year-old vines but already shows a massive concentration of black fruit married to vibrant acidity and a powerful tannin frame.

Wines from the 2022 vintage make up 18 percent of this report. It was a long, cool growing season – more like 2012 and 2013, according to Elizabeth Boursier – with a warm October giving the grapes much-needed hang time to ripen. The latest releases are mostly white wines, the most impressive by some margin being Dossier’s spicy, aromatically complex Sauvignon Blanc Halo Reserve 2022. The top reds from 2022 include a fragrant offering from Dossier, their Syrah Flagship 2022, plus a slew of elegant, well-structured reds from Betz: a pure Red Mountain cabernet sauvignon, the Heart of the Hill 2022; a merlot-driven blend, the Clos de Betz 2022; and a gorgeously sleek syrah, La Côte Patriarche 2022.

We only tasted 10 wines from 2023, but winemakers spoke about it with a sense of relief.

“2023 was a warm but welcome, more normal harvest,” Latta said. “2023 felt easy in comparison to the last two or three. It was a more typical Washington vintage – I think a high-quality year with excellent color.”

I was certainly reminded of how much grape growing is at the mercy of nature while walking through the vineyards in Walla Walla Valley last month in freezing temperatures. Only a month earlier, devastatingly cold temperatures in mid-January left growers and producers apprehensive, particularly in eastern Walla Walla, where temperatures dropped to a low of negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 9 degrees Celsius) for several hours. Winemakers expressed concerns about the extent of the damage.

“Red Mountain seemed to dodge the bullet,” said Canvasback winemaker Joseph Czarny as we stood looking out over a series of southwest facing plantings on Red Mountain from their Longwinds estate vineyard.

“Columbia Valley as a whole seems to have about 25 percent frost damage, but they know how to farm around it. Walla Walla got hit the worst. It could be up to 60 percent crop damage. People were running wind machines, but there was no warm inversion.”

Delmas winemaker Brooke Robertson told me that the last deep freeze of minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 24.4 Celsius) in the 2016-2017 winter caused 70 percent bud death across all varieties in their vineyard in the Rocks District. She showed me the mounds of soil piled up around the base of every single vine, which she believed to have limited bud death this year to about 20 percent. Producers like Betz and Cayuse bury canes over winter – labor intensive insurance, if not quite as extreme as Delmas's method – so that they can retrain their vines in case of a hard freeze.

“By the end of first or second week of March, we’ll see what the material looks like and know how much damage there is,” said Betz winemaker Louis Skinner.

Perhaps grape supply and demand will end up being balanced this year, after all.

Regardless of the challenges faced by growers and winemakers, the wines in the list below speak to Washington’s ability to produce high-quality wines with character. And with the diversity – of varieties, terroir and winemaking – seemingly of a country rather than a state, we have no doubt that they will continue to climb to even greater heights.

– Claire Nesbitt, Associate Editor

Note: 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.