Fly east from Seattle over the Cascades and the land changes colour within minutes: the green of the coast gives way to brown steppe, sagebrush and the Columbia River. The mountains wring the moisture out of the Pacific air, and the Columbia Basin behind them gets around 200 millimetres of rain a year; without water from the Columbia, the Yakima and the Snake there would hardly be a vineyard. The state has about 24,000 hectares of wine grapes, almost all of them east of the mountains, and after California it is the largest producer of wine from European grape varieties in the United States.
Geneva’s latitude, desert light
The vineyards lie at about 46 degrees north, the latitude of Burgundy and of Geneva and Lausanne. Midsummer brings nearly 16 hours of daylight, almost an hour more than in Napa, and cold desert nights: the swing can reach 20 degrees, which keeps the grapes fresh. The soils date from the last ice age: the Missoula floods left gravel and silt over basalt, later topped with wind-blown loess. They are sandy and poor, with one famous consequence: phylloxera struggles in them, so many vines still grow ungrafted on their own roots. The price is the winter: arctic air can bring minus 25 degrees, and the freezes of 1996 and 2003 did serious damage, to Merlot above all.
In the glass
The grapes the region is known for, by sweetness, acidity, tannin and body.
| Grape | Sweetness | Acidity | Tannin | Body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cabernet Sauvignon | dry | medium to high | medium(+) to high | medium to full |
| Merlot | dry | medium(−) to medium | medium(−) to medium(+) | medium to full |
| Syrah | dry | medium to medium(+) | medium to high | medium to full |
| Riesling | dry to luscious | high | white, no tannin | light to medium(+) |
| Chardonnay | dry | medium to high | white, no tannin | medium(−) to full |
Each grape’s typical range worldwide, not in this region alone, on the WSET tasting grid (Level 3, 2022): dry to luscious, low to high, light to full. The dot before each name shows the colour of a typical bottle.
One umbrella, many names
Almost everything sits under one appellation: the Columbia Valley AVA, drawn in 1984 across about a quarter of the state, holds over 99 per cent of the vines. Yakima Valley, Washington’s first AVA in 1983, is one of its largest growing areas; Red Mountain, a bare slope near the Tri-Cities, is small and hot and known for some of the state’s most structured Cabernet; the Horse Heaven Hills above the Columbia supply volume and some of the state’s dearest bottles; the Walla Walla Valley, an AVA since 1984, straddles the Oregon line and has one of the densest clusters of wineries. Into Canada the trough runs on as the Okanagan.
Sense of scale
24,000 ha Washington State has about 1.7× as many vines as all of Switzerland.
One square is all of Switzerland: about 14,350 hectares of vines.
Vineyards compared
Vineyard area in hectares, rounded, as the articles give it. Regions without a reliable figure are left out.
Riesling with a Mosel accent
Chateau Ste. Michelle, the state’s oldest winery, traces its roots to 1934, the year after Repeal, and has had its château at Woodinville, near Seattle, since 1976. Riesling long defined the state: with the 1999 vintage the winery and Ernst Loosen of Bernkastel on the Mosel launched Eroica, an off-dry Riesling. Leonetti Cellar, the first winery of the modern Walla Walla Valley, opened in 1977; Quilceda Creek, founded in 1978 north of Seattle, received two 100-point scores from The Wine Advocate in 2006, the first for an American wine from outside California. Today Cabernet Sauvignon leads with over a quarter of the harvest, and the state counts around a thousand wineries.
Ripe but not heavy
Washington Cabernet and Merlot sit between Napa and Bordeaux: ripe black fruit, firm tannin and a freshness from the cold nights, at 16 to 18 degrees with lamb or a rib-eye steak. Syrah is dark and peppery; the Rieslings, dry to off-dry, are made for Asian food. For a Swiss reader the comparison is latitude, not grape: the vines of the Columbia Valley stand as far north as Lake Geneva, yet the long days and the desert heat ripen Cabernet Sauvignon fully.