Grapevine: Spokane-area wineries

In many wine publications, reviews and restaurant wine lists you may notice the phrase “aromatic white wines” popping up. It’s an interesting concept, and may lead you to explore some newer wine styles that are becoming quite popular.

It’s a fact that more than three-quarters of all Champagne sales occur between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy good bubbly year-round. Well-made, dry sparkling wines are among the most versatile in the world. They pair with summer foods, appetizers, and picnic fare especially well.

My general advice to small, startup wineries is to focus. Make something your calling card. Don’t try to make 30 different wines until you’ve figured out how to do three or four well. Abacela, located in southern Oregon, is a fine example of a winery that started with a specific focus, built on it and now offers a breathtakingly large lineup of estate-grown blends and varietals, including some never before seen in the Northwest.

It’s baaaack. The wine that wine geeks love to hate. The wine that famously was drunk out of a spit bucket in the movie “Sideways.” The wine that new research shows “has the single largest consumer base of any varietal wine in the U.S. and ... is the one most closely associated with high quality at an affordable price.”

Some splendid new releases have livened up my tastings this week, with three Spokane wineries in the spotlight. At Caterina ( www.caterina.com), a major tasting room renovation is under way, as new owner Don Townshend takes over the winery, which has languished for some years.

Wine Blue Book is an online/e-mail buying guide that regularly compiles reviews and scores on hundreds of wines, lists them by price and ranks them by value. A free trial issue is available at this Web site: www.winebluebook.com. I have no financial interest or connection with this enterprise, but they do include many of my reviews in their database, and it’s a useful tool in anyone’s wine-finding kit. The current issue looks at champagne, just in time for the holidays.

There is no question that tough times are upon us for grape growers, wineries and retailers. But for consumers, there are more outstanding value wines than I’ve seen in a decade or more. Here in Washington, some wineries are offering discounts of up to 50 percent. Many are dramatically cutting their case production of expensive wines and ramping up production of their budget bottles – often using the same grapes that would previously have gone into the high-priced stuff.

Crush is on, in full-ferment mode, and there is no better time to visit your Spokane wineries. Walk in and you are almost certain to see grapes arriving, being sorted and de-stemmed, and gently sent to fermentation bins and tanks. The heady scents of fermentation fill the air, and winery workers are energized by the crisp mornings, the late nights, the frenetic activity, the excitement of the new vintage. Where else in the modern world can a city-dweller experience the scents and flavors of the harvest as it unfolds?