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Walla Walla's Vineyards are on the Rise
from 1889 Washington's Magazine + Special Insert: Destination Resorts Northwest | December/January 2023
Walla Walla on the Rise
The pursuit of cooler climes and fresh terroir is leading vineyards toward higher ground
written and photographed by Daniel O’Neil
A drive up the Walla Walla River feels like a detour from that area’s world-famous vineyards. Canyon walls quickly build into dark rock outcroppings as the Blue Mountains draw nearer. Ponderosa pines begin to take hold on the ridgelines where bears, cougars and rattlesnakes roam. Along the road, cattle graze, apples grow and there’s not a vine in sight until the elevation reaches 1,300 feet. Then begins the future of Walla Walla wine.
Christophe Baron’s Hors Catégorie vineyard appears like a fantasy, sculpted into busted-up basalt slopes too steep for tractors, syrah with a Wild West backdrop. A turn up the South Fork leads to a valley-floor vineyard, the oldest one here. But continuing up the North Fork, vines again cling to the south-facing canyon wall and up onto the gentler terrain atop the ridge, at 2,000 feet, where new grapevines have taken hold.
A dozen miles north, just east of downtown Walla Walla, a more familiar winegrowing area is in rapid expansion. The Mill Creek corridor, which Chris Figgins helped put on the map, has grown award-winning wine grapes since the turn of this century. Yet its story has hardly begun. Longtime vintners and optimistic newcomers have staked new claims on the broad hillside above Mill Creek, each pushing farther east into the foothills of the Blues, all propelled by the same interests as those planting along the North Fork.
Walla Walla is heating up. As wine drinkers across the country embrace the bold, expressive reds grown in this celebrated American Viticultural Area (AVA), outside and local investment follow suit. New reaches for Walla Walla wine country mean fresh terroirs to taste, which attracts tourism, a win-win for the region.
But the migration east into the Blue Mountains foothills makes sense for more pressing reasons. Growing season temperatures have already advanced enough to concern winegrowers and winemakers. Many also fear a water-scarce future here. Higher-elevation areas like the North Fork and Mill Creek offer cooler temperatures and more rainfall. For Walla Walla wines, there’s nowhere to go but upward.
Rick Small is not surprised to see new vineyards along these foothills. Small founded Woodward Canyon Winery in 1981, one of Walla Walla’s first, when the air was colder and the warmest sites still appealed to grapes. Over time, he planted farther up his hills, seeking cooler parcels. Small’s four decades of consecutive red wine vintages now offer perspective that’s more tangible than a meteorological chart.
“When you start seeing what’s happening in the bottle, seeing when the grapes get ripe and what the flavor profile is compared to forty or even thirty years ago, you start to taste it, to see it, to smell it,” Small said. “You experience it. And it’s pretty obvious. We’re having less and less of the cooler vintages and more of the warmer ones.”
Nominally only a few degrees warmer than when Small first planted, the Walla Walla Valley already sees more intense heat waves and earlier harvests, neither a harbinger of fine wine. Ever since the late 1990s, hot vintages have become the new normal. Walla Walla has had to adapt, which has already yielded some delicious surprises.
When you start seeing what’s happening in the bottle, seeing when the grapes get ripe and what the flavor profile is compared to forty or even thirty years ago, you start to taste it, to see it, to smell it. You experience it. And it’s pretty obvious. We’re having less and less of the cooler vintages and more of the warmer ones.
In 2005, grapevines had yet to be planted on the North Fork’s intimidating slopes when Baron purchased the property that would become Hors Catégorie. “It was like a rough diamond, and I saw the potential,” he said. “For the last fifteen years, I have been polishing that stone. It’s my American jewel.”
Founder of waitlist-only wines like Cayuse and Horsepower, Baron is a superstar of Walla Walla wine. Originally from Champagne, France, where his family has produced sparkling wine since the seventeenth century, Baron made his mark in 1997 when he was the first to plant wine grapes in what became The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater, a sub-AVA of the Walla Walla Valley.
In French, “hors catégorie” means “in a class of one’s own.” Steep faces angled west, south and east, elevations between 1,300 and 1,500 feet, very shallow fragmented basalt soils of two distinct types: new terroir for Baron to bottle. He planted two acres of syrah in 2011, and released his first Hors Catégorie wine three years later. Critically acclaimed, it is Walla Walla’s most elusive label. Every drop of wine from the tiny biodynamic vineyard goes into the final blend, producing only 1,500 to 2,000 bottles per vintage.
“Everyone said I was crazy to plant vineyards in The Stones,” Baron said, using his preferred term for The Rocks District. “Well, look at what’s going on right now.”
Today, that sub-AVA—which, like the North Fork, is actually located on the Oregon side of the cross-border Walla Walla Valley AVA—is a bonanza.
“They said the same thing about the North Fork: ‘He’s crazy, he’s going to lose all his money.’ Now there’s new development going on there.”
Searching for new terroir expressions and a haven from climate change, Walla Walla’s wine industry has arrived on the North Fork. The remote area’s first vineyard, Resurgent, was planted in 1998 on the South Fork, but it lies on the alluvial flats. Today’s plantings follow the North Fork upstream, basking in exceptional growing conditions along the river canyon’s tall northern flank.
Elevation proves a critical asset in the North Fork. In the middle of summer, temperatures remain lower than in the rest of Walla Walla wine country. This matters because when the mercury rises past the mid-90s, grapevines shut down to protect themselves, disturbing the ripening process.
North Fork vineyards also sit above the temperature inversion that floods the Walla Walla Valley with frost in spring and fall. And on summer mornings, air temperatures can hover twenty degrees warmer than in the valley, extending the growing season. Baron harvests Hors Catégorie two weeks later than his vineyards in the valley-floor Rocks District, an important gain as climate change nudges harvest earlier, in discord with the grapevine’s natural rhythm.
Jesús Martínez Bujanda, fifth-generation CEO of his family’s Valdemar Estates, sees the same retreat to higher winegrowing ground in his native Spain. Bujanda’s Rioja-rooted wine family opened its Walla Walla winery in 2019. Three years ago, in partnership with Force Majeure Vineyards, they purchased and planted acreage in the North Fork. Elevations here begin at 1,800 feet and rise past 2,200 feet, suggesting a freshness and higher acidity in the wines, exactly what Valdemar seeks. As with Baron, Bujanda appreciates the North Fork’s promising terroir.
“I would not be invested there if I didn’t think that place was special,” Bujanda said. “Only time will tell. That’s the beauty and the problem with winegrowing and winemaking. In ten years, I will be able to say if we were right or wrong, but it has all the potential to be a very unique winegrowing area.”
Valdemar has planted almost seven acres of chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah but still awaits its first harvest here. Once in production, Bujanda is confident that the ridgetop’s deep, windblown silt, or loess, soils will accommodate farming without irrigation.
According to the Washington State Department of Ecology, by the 2040s Walla Walla River flows will have decreased by up to 66 percent, and by as much as 89 percent by the 2080s. Dry farming, unthinkable in most vineyards east of the Cascade Range, proves viable in deep, water-retaining soils like atop the North Fork.
“You get some really interesting wines when the grape roots can penetrate into the underlying basalt because it’s a completely different suite of minerals down there,” said Kevin Pogue, a professor of geology at Whitman College and a vineyard site consultant. “But in the Columbia Basin, you’re limited to expand viticulture because of restrictions on drilling new agricultural water wells. The North Fork is great because you can choose what kind of terroir you want.”
The North Fork has room to grow, but not much. Excessively steep forested terrain with unsuitable soil begins not far east of Valdemar’s new vineyard. Pogue figures only 500 to 600 acres of plantable vineyard land await on the North Fork’s south-facing slope. The South Fork could also see vineyards crawl up its northern wall.
Baron welcomes new vineyard expansion along the Walla Walla River. “It’s still a land of opportunity here, and that’s what I enjoy about this place,” he said. “There’s this feeling of being a pioneer, of being first. You can’t be a pioneer in Champagne or Burgundy—it has already been done.”
A few miles east of downtown Walla Walla, past the quiet airport, Mill Creek Road swiftly takes visitors into the countryside. Heading toward the looming, folded Blue Mountains, rolling fields of wheat still dominate the landscape. But vineyards and wineries are catching up fast, spreading farther and farther east.
“Mill Creek is a great place for the same reasons as the North Fork,” Pogue said. “That area is poised to be a real star in the viticultural landscape of Washington because these people are well capitalized and have ambitious plans for vineyards, wines and facilities up there.”
If the North Fork proves how Walla Walla wines can push the boundaries of what’s viticulturally possible, Mill Creek reveals the growth happening within this wine region, and where it’s headed.
Less remote and abrupt than the North Fork, Mill Creek benefits from several of the same environmental factors. Elevations here range from 1,500 to nearly 3,000 feet, after which the geography becomes unsuitable for farming. At such heights, Mill Creek rests above the cold air inversion and benefits from about 220 frost-free days annually.
Mill Creek’s diurnal shift can be extreme as temperatures drop by 25 degrees at sunset on hot summer days. Strong nightly winds off the Blues, evident in the shape of tree canopies, and a later harvest than for most of Walla Walla all help to thicken grape skins, darken color and preserve tannin and acidity.
“Rugged mountains, rugged fruit is kind of the style up here,” said Figgins, who knows Mill Creek’s vinous potential better than most. His father, Gary, founded Leonetti Cellar in 1977, now one of Walla Walla’s most prestigious labels. “My dad once told me the south-facing slope of Mill Creek was like the Côte-d’Or, and it would all be planted one day,” Figgins said.
Out of college, Figgins’ first project was to create Leonetti’s Mill Creek Uplands vineyard, in 1997. “When we planted Uplands at 1,600 feet, people thought we were nuts, like, ‘That’s too high, it’ll never get ripe up there,’” he said. But the 2010 Leonetti Reserve cabernet sauvignon, which Figgins made entirely from Uplands grapes, scored 100 points from a prominent critic.
Now, his family has acquired another Mill Creek property, two miles east of their Uplands and Figgins vineyards. Elevations here span from 1,700 to 2,600 feet, but for now it remains under wheat.
“In thinking about the future and hedging against warming, we couldn’t be better situated,” Figgins said. “One of the things that’s really promising about Walla Walla is that as things warm, if we have to move vineyards to higher ground, we’ve got higher ground to the east, and it gets more precipitation.”
Due to their elevation in the Blue Mountains foothills, Mill Creek vineyards receive at least twenty inches of rain annually—each mile east gains one inch of rain—hence the ponderosa pines along the creek’s north-facing bluffs. Most rain falls outside of the growing season, but very deep loess soils retain this moisture and offer it to grapevines throughout summer, making irrigation optional.
“It’s inevitable that dry-farm winegrowing will jump out of the North Fork and Mill Creek into some of these larger, oldschool farm parcels,” Figgins said. “That is going to be the story of agriculture in the West. There’s not a water basin that’s not over-appropriated. We need to be forwardlooking and sustainable.”
Investors have taken note. Besides Figgins’ own new winery under construction, other vineyards and wineries have begun to emerge along the Mill Creek corridor. Echolands Winery, a recent addition to the Walla Walla scene, is currently developing a 341-acre property situated between the Uplands and Figgins vineyards. Dry farming and the Figgins’ track record explain some of Echolands co-owner Doug Frost’s decision to set roots in Mill Creek.
“Once you start looking at places like the North Fork and Mill Creek, you realize there’s more,” Frost said. “I think where we’re at right now in Mill Creek seems a little extreme to some people. But I bet in ten or fifteen years it’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re kind of on the west side.’ The opportunity to wander up into the Blues is only limited by the AVA boundaries.”
Pogue wrote the sub-AVA petition for The Rocks District, which became official in 2015. Today, he is drafting a petition for another sub-AVA: Mill Creek-Walla Walla Valley. It would encompass 5,000 acres. Pogue estimates that vineyards in Mill Creek currently occupy less than one-tenth of that.
Walla Walla’s saving grace—elevation—makes Mill Creek appealing. But it also limits inclusion in any AVA. In 2000, Figgins helped expand the Walla Walla Valley AVA that his dad and Small first delineated in 1984. “We decided arbitrarily to make the eastern boundary the 2,000-foot contour line, which made sense at the time,” Figgins said. “But now we’re getting petit verdot ripe at 1,700 feet, so for sure we can ripen grapes successfully at over 2,000 feet.”
Everyone with a high-elevation interest in Mill Creek and the North Fork would like to see that contour line raised one day. But matters get tricky because the Walla Walla Valley AVA is itself a sub-AVA of the massive Columbia Valley AVA. Changes to the sub-AVAs require identical changes to the Columbia Valley AVA.
“The entire Washington wine industry would have to agree,” Figgins said. “So another region in Washington could say they want to raise their elevation or move their borders. It’ll happen at some point, but it will take an industry-wide, concerted effort.”
Some, though, like Small, would prefer a different approach. “The compelling part of an appellation [AVA] is its integrity,” he said. “If you start expanding the appellation just to fit in other desirable locations, like higher elevations, then you’ve compromised the whole concept of an appellation. I wouldn’t think you could constantly just keep rewriting an appellation because it would be meaningless eventually. It would be better to develop an appellation of some other kind.”
In the meantime, wineries can include county or state names on high-elevation labels instead. Valdemar intends to do so, and it will sell those wines to its wine club members. These, and eventual bottlings from Figgins’ new vineyard property, will help legitimize claims for a raised contour line and potential new sub-AVAs like for the North Fork.
Motivated by climate and terroir, Walla Walla’s wine industry is on the hunt for new locales. Young vines grow in the Palouse north of Mill Creek, and experimental vineyards exist even deeper in the Blues. Walla Walla’s AVA map and cellars will look much more diverse by mid-century.
Baron found his diamond on the North Fork, and he has no plans for new projects in Walla Walla. But a couple of high-elevation hillsides have caught Baron’s eye farther up the Walla Walla River and Mill Creek, for others to discover and develop one day. “I know a few places with great potential like Hors Catégorie,” he said. “I just can’t say where they are.”
