Grape Nuts Eastern Washington Growers Help Make The State’s Wines Shine

It’s a late September morning and already short-sleeve shirt weather in the Sunnyside vineyards owned by Hogue Cellars winery. This is harvest time in the state’s wine country, and it’s shaping up to be a record crop with projections of up to 70,000 tons.

A mechanical picker rumbles through the rows of fruit, sending up a fragrant, fruity scent. A loud air gun explodes every few minutes to scare off the hungry starlings.

There’s not a cloud in the sky, yet David Forsyth - Hogue’s winemaker for the past 13 years - is worried about rain.

Weather reports predict a storm will move in the next couple of days, and after rain the previous week, that can mean trouble. Grapes that won’t fully ripen. Mold developing on wet clusters of fruit. Berries that plump up with the late-season moisture, diluting the grape’s flavor.

Forsyth is wondering whether to “pull the plug” and pick chardonnay grapes or let the fruit hang a few more days.

“You work for years getting things set up the way you want in the vineyard. It was looking to be the perfect year and then nature takes a hand,” says Forsyth, who spends at least six hours a day in the vineyards this time of year. “I guess you just have to try and be philosophical. Shrug your shoulders. Because that’s farming.”

This region’s first wine grapes were planted at Fort Vancouver in the late 1800s, but only in the past 30 years have commercial vintners squeezed out a measure of success.

What makes Eastern Washington look like the promised land to grape growers is its desert location at a northern latitude. The fruit gets lots of heat, but because it’s also so far north, the nights are cool. That makes for ideal grape-growing conditions.

“We’re very similar to the great wine-producing regions in France,” said Jim Miles, the executive director of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers.

Appreciating fermented fruit from a bottle usually evokes images of stuffy connoisseurs swirling and sniffing goblets of cabernet or merlot while discussing the merits of a particular vintage. But the whole process starts with the rather dirty, sometimes exasperating business of producing world-class grapes.

“Great wine is really made in the vineyard,” said David Lake, the respected winemaker from Columbia Winery. “More people are paying attention to that.”

Of the 91 wineries in Washington, some also own their vineyards. But at least half the wine producers purchase their grapes from more than 200 independent growers.

In the past few years, there’s been an evolution, if not a revolution, in the state’s vineyards. Farmers previously preoccupied with producing big crops are instead looking for ways to improve quality and flavor.

And winemakers have joined in those efforts. They’re no longer just waiting near their presses during harvest for the fruit to arrive. They’re out in the vineyards, getting dirt under their fingernails and popping grapes into their mouths to taste for ripeness.

“I think we’ve recognized you can do a lot more to improve the quality of wine in the vineyard,” Forsyth said.

The state’s growing regions are divided into areas called appellations, the biggest being the Columbia Valley and the smallest, Walla Walla Valley.

Throughout Eastern Washington, vineyards have colorful names - Horse Heaven Hills, Cold Creek, Canoe Ridge, Red Willow, Seven Hills - and all have their own unique attributes.

At Red Willow, in the Yakima Valley appellation, there are no stately trees as the name might suggest. In fact, looking at the dusty brown scrub land that surrounds the vineyards, it’s hard to imagine what possessed Mike Sauer to plant his first vines there in the late ‘70s.

“I was just out of Washington State University and there was a lot of enthusiasm at the time about wine grapes. I married into the family, and we were looking for something different to get into,” said Sauer, a soft-spoken man with a weathered face and a quick smile.

He learned that poor, rocky soil can sometimes grow the best grapes because the fruit has better flavor if it’s stressed.

“You work with what the soil gives you,” Sauer said.

He hooked up early on with David Lake, the renowned winemaker at Columbia Winery. Nearly all the grapes grown at Red Willow are sold to Columbia. Since 1981, the winery has produced a reserve cabernet sauvignon that bears the vineyard’s name on the label.

The two men shared a forward-thinking approach to grape growing, and soon Sauer was venturing into untried varietals, trying to determine which grapes grew best in certain soil and under different climatic conditions.

“David really deserves credit for seeing the vineyard’s potential and pulling me up a level,” Sauer said. “Our temperaments are similar. We’re both nitpickers. Perfectionists.”

Riding a motorized “mule” through a steep hillside portion of his 130 acres of vines, Sauer pointed out Italian grapes such as nebbiolo and sangiovese and a varietal typically found only in Spain called tempernillo. There are also plantings of French blending grapes called malbec and cabernet franc.

Talking about the different grapes, Sauer sounds like a proud parent, especially when describing syrah - a variety with roots in the south of France.

“It’s easy to work with, generous in flavor and it’s a dream to pick,” Sauer said as he plucked an inky-purple grape from the vine, tasted it and spit out the seeds. He predicts syrah will be Washington’s new rising star, a red wine with strength and depth that’s velvety smooth to drink.

As the grapes hang heavy on the vines this time of year, it’s natural to feel a sense of satisfaction. Yet getting the fruit to this point is certainly no cake walk.

In the past few years, crop management has become a much-used buzzword in the state’s wine industry. It simply means paying attention to so many details - from irrigation techniques to whether to prune clusters of grapes so the remaining fruit will have a more intense, concentrated flavor.

One tiny piece of the process might involve stripping leaves from vines that face the morning sun to allow for more exposure to the light. On the other side of the same row, grapes could require shade from the intense afternoon sun.

Through years of trial and error, Sauer has determined ideal conditions for his grapes.

Sauer recently rigged up an elaborate system for misting the temperamental nebbiolo grapes, which are susceptible to sunburn.

“The hired men love to ride the three-wheelers through there on a hot day,” he said.

On a blistering afternoon, Sauer might take refuge in the stone chapel that sits on top of a hill, surrounded by vines.

“We built it with rocks from the vineyard, modeling after something you might see in Europe,” said Sauer, who has made trips to famous grape-growing regions in France and Italy. “I might come huffing and puffing up the hill, grab some grapes and go sit inside, think and pray.”

Divine guidance won’t help Sauer figure out the best time to pick the grapes, though. He closely monitors the fruit’s ripeness by measuring levels of sugars and acids and keeping track of them in a notebook.

When the time comes to harvest, grapes are loaded into shallow plastic bins in the vineyards. Those bins are dumped into large wooden crates, which are weighed and forklifted into a chilled shed. Around nightfall, the fruit is trucked to the winery in Woodinville.

Even before all the grapes are in, Sauer is already looking ahead to next year. He’s excited about a new section of the vineyard planted with a French varietal called viognier.

“We’re not going to expand anymore. We’re just going to keep working on quality and establishing our identity,” Sauer said.

When longtime farmers Mike and Gary Hogue first thought about planting grapes, they stood on a hill near Prosser and imagined vines everywhere.

“It all looked the same to us,” said Gary Hogue, the brother in charge of marketing Hogue Cellar’s wines around the world. “We thought we could grow anything anywhere.”

Some years later, the state’s growers learned different varieties like different growing conditions. A cool-weather-loving chardonnay won’t appreciate being planted next to cabernet, a variety that thrives in the heat.

In one vineyard, there can be different soil types, even different weather patterns.

On that recent sunny September morning, Forsyth pointed out a piece of land covered with newly baled hay and explained that it was once part of the vineyard. But because it sits in a slight dip, it was a magnet for freezing air.

“We’re going through a continual evolution, always looking for ways to improve,” said Forsyth. “In five years, I expect to be doing things differently.”

One shift that has taken place is the way grapes are picked - now mostly by mechanical harvesters instead of by hand. Watching this 12-foot tall farm implement straddle a row and shake the fruit violently off the vine is a world away from the romantic notion of peasants snipping clusters and gently loading grapes into baskets.

The reality is somewhere in between with the picker shaking the fruit onto a conveyor belt. It whizzes by a worker who pulls out leaves and vines that fall along with the grapes. Some of the skins on the grapes break, but most remain intact.

“We still hand-pick our reserve vineyards,” Forsyth said. “But for our wines that sell for $5 a bottle, this just makes sense. You can pick during the middle of the night when the grapes are cool. And it picks an acre of grapes in an hour.”

Growing grapes is challenging work, but it’s also rewarding to walk into a supermarket and see a bottle of wine on the shelf you helped produce. In addition to owning 350 acres of varietal grapes, Hogue buys from 47 independent growers.

“We try to connect the growers to the finished product as much as possible,” Forsyth said. In the winter, “we sit down with them and tell them where their fruit ended up and talk about what we would like to do differently.”

It’s not always easy to convince some growers to change their ways.

“Farmers are conservative by nature and if you want to experiment, they like to see how it’s going to turn out first,” Forsyth said.

Hogue was the first winery in the state to pay growers by the acre instead of the ton in an effort to boost quality of the fruit and cut down on overcropping.

“There was a lot of resistance to that idea at first,” Forsyth said. “And then, the farmers who didn’t buy into it ended up kicking themselves.”

The view from Canoe Ridge Vineyards just outside Paterson is spectacular - the mighty Columbia and Oregon to the south. Flat farmland stretches out for miles to the north.

The site was named by explorers Lewis and Clark because it looked like an upside down dugout canoe. To a slew of folks in the wine industry, it looks like gold.

Just ask the Californians who bought into the deal.

The Chalone Wine Group, which owns an impressive lineup of wineries including Acacia and Edna Valley and has connections to the Rothschild estate in France, planted merlot and chardonnay in 1989.

“They broke the barrier,” said Bob Brown, the vineyard manager at Canoe Ridge. “California had never shown interest here before.”

Since then, others have followed Chalone’s lead in developing vineyards on Canoe Ridge. Stimson Lane, which owns Columbia Crest and Chateau Ste. Michelle, has vineyards in the area, and this year, Hogue planted 75 acres in the area.

Brown explained the attraction: “There’s good air drainage, so it’s less susceptible to spring frosts. And it’s a good climate.”

When other areas experienced devastating winterkill in 1996, Canoe Ridge dodged the bullet. When rain falls elsewhere, it will likely miss Canoe Ridge.

“We’re not sure if we’ll always be so lucky,” Brown said.

Brown uses the latest technology to ensure the vineyard’s success won’t be left strictly up to luck. Sitting in his office in front of a glowing computer screen, he monitors the levels of water supplied to the vines with an underground device called a neutron probe. He diligently records levels of sugars, pH balance and acids in a specially designed program.

“You use technology as a tool, but you still go out there and look at what the grapes are doing,” Brown said.

One spot Brown often ends up after a long day is a grassy clearing where an authentic teepee sits.

“John (Abbott, Canoe Ridge’s winemaker) had this inspiration one afternoon when we were sitting around drinking beer,” Brown said.

The teepee - made by a woman from the Umatilla tribe - serves as sleeping quarters for visiting VIPs and is a real draw for local kids. It’s put up at bud break in the spring and taken down after harvest.

“Everyone wants to come up here. It’s the talk of the town,” Brown said. “There’s a special feeling about it.”

Andrew Jefford, a British wine writer, even wrote about it in London’s Evening Standard after his visit to the vineyard this summer: “The stars I could see through the top of the teepee glittered as brightly as salmon scales in the dark night.”

Walking down the rows of grapes at Pepperbridge Vineyard near Walla Walla is a little like taking a stroll in the winemakers hall of fame.

Individual rows are marked with color-coded tags that bear the names of the Washington’s superstar vintners: Rick Small of Woodward Canyon, Gary Figgins of Leonetti Cellars, Marty Clubb from L’Ecole, Chris Camarda of Andrew Will. The grapes are set aside for just these winemakers, who believe they are among the best in the state.

“It’s still a young vineyard, but there is such great potential there,” said Small, who also gets grapes from other sources and from his own 19-acre vineyard near Walla Walla. “I’ve made some awfully good wines from there.”

Across a narrow dirt path are apple orchards where branches are weighed down with softball-size Fujis.

This unique blending of apples and grapes on a single piece of land is the work of Norm McKibben, a retired executive who turned his passion for farming into a second career.

“I had a farming background and I loved wine,” said McKibben, who works with an on-site botanist at the Pepperbridge vineyard.

McKibben was one of the early investors in Hogue Cellars and, most recently, purchased Seven Hills Vineyard near Milton-Freewater, Ore. That vineyard - across the border, but still in the Walla Walla Valley appellation - has produced grapes that have gone into many award-winning wines. And McKibben is in the process of expanding Seven Hills dramatically - from 20 acres to 130.

What makes this a groundbreaking venture is that McKibben has teamed up with Figgins and Clubb, giving the winemakers the chance to be growers, too (though Figgins has other vineyards around Walla Walla).

“Winemakers realize no matter how good they are, they can’t make great wine without great grapes,” McKibben said.

McKibben is constantly exploring ways to grow better grapes, whether it’s spreading cherry pits on the dirt roads around the vineyards to keep the dust down, trying a new technique for trellising the grapes or testing a new drip irrigation system.

“We’ve had big leaps forward in what we know,” McKibben said. “We keep searching for the varietals that work best, experimenting with different clones. I’m not sure I’m going to see the region’s full potential realized in my lifetime.”

He remains convinced that things will only improve.

“As the vines get older, the wines are only going to get better,” McKibben said.

The rain that David Forsyth had been dreading didn’t come.

“We got a little bit, but the wind kicked up and we kept everyone picking,” Forsyth said.

More good news: “The wines are looking good, the juice is coming in with a lot of flavor,” he said.

No records will be broken this harvest, though, he said.

“We’ve rebounded big time from last year, but I don’t think we’re going to have as big a year as was originally anticipated.”

Of course, there’s still time.

“There are some rieslings we just like to let hang and hang, but Mother Nature usually pulls the curtain on us with that final frost around October 31st,” he said.

Whenever Forsyth starts stressing, he tries to remind himself that “grapes are very resilient. I probably worry way too much.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 8 Color Photos; Map of Washington vineyard tour

MEMO: These 3 sidebars appeared with the story: 1. GRAPE FACTS Acres planted with vinifera grapes in Washington: 16,500. In California: more than 300,000 acres. This year’s projected harvest for Washington: 60,000 to 70,000 tons. Last year’s crop: 35,000 tons. Last year’s crop in California: 2.1 million tons. The state’s northern-most vineyard: Arbor Crest in Spokane. How long before a newly planted vine bears wine-worthy grapes: Three years. Varietal grapes planted in Washington: (reds) merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, syrah, pinot noir, lemberger and (whites) chardonnay, white riesling, semillon, sauvignon blanc, chenin blanc, gewurztraminer. Most planted varietal: chardonnay. Number of premium wine grape growers: 265. This year’s most expensive grape variety: syrah, at $1,700 a ton.

2. FOR MORE INFO For a brochure on touring the Washington wine country, send a long, self-addressed, stamped envelope to the Washington Wine Center, 500 Union St., Suite 945, Seattle WA 98101. Or call (206) 667-9463.

3. ONE CRITIC’S VIEW “Washington’s articulate, well-balanced, vivid yet refined reds compete with the best.” Andrew Jefford, The London Evening Standard.