Tag Archives: wine

Woodinville: A How-To for Seattle’s Favorite Boozy Backyard

Wine country in the fall. Photo courtesy of Flickr.

With the holiday season on the horizon, there’s a chance you’ll have your share of out-of-town guests. And once you’ve gone through the usual runaround, e.g. Space Needle, the aquarium, EMP, next on your list should be wine tasting. Wine tasting in Woodinville, to be specific.

Washington grows some truly great grapes, many of which are appreciated and sought after all over the world, and it’s worth the short car trip to discover them with friends. While a trek to Eastern Washington or even Willamette Valley would be fun, this time of year, the weather might hinder a day trip. Factor in the cost of the drive and the possible overnight stay and suddenly you might wish your guests weren’t staying so long. So instead, consider Woodinville Wine Country.

About 30 minutes from Seattle in the Sammamish River Valley, Woodinville has quietly but surely trucked along into becoming one of Washington’s primo oeno destinations. While almost all the grapes are grown in Eastern Washington, Woodinville is home to tasting rooms for over 90 wineries, similar to the dozens of other wineries that find it makes sense to pour and sell on this side of the pass. Many of the brands are grouped together in one location, making it super easy to park and (tipsily) walk to several places.

We did the preliminary research, so you don’t have to. Just tip back that glass and enjoy the trip with these tips and ideas for optimal wine navigation.

Tips for Wining:

  • It goes without saying, but bring along a designated driver, or hire a car service or limo. When everyone in the party chips in, a limo is often a more affordable — not to mention a hell of a lot more relaxing — option than driving yourself.
  • Ask the sommelier or tasting room manager for their recommendation for the next drink. Many wineries and tasting rooms have sister companies, or insider information and discounts for those who stay within friend groups. Typically, once you start drinking, follow the rabbit trail of recommendations and, chances are, you’ll only have to pay for the first flight.
  • Check winery websites for special events, hours, and locations. Not only can this help you save a buck (gas, special discounts), but it can also help you map out a route so you don’t have to make a plan when you’d rather just relax.
  • Take a notebook to write down the wines you tasted, and most importantly what you liked. Pencils not your thing? Download a tasting app that can help you chart the specific notes you pick up, and impress your friends.
  • Make sure you take time out for lunch and/or dinner. Too much wine on an empty stomach can cause… wait for it… too much whining in some people. Consider Woodinville’s Barking Frog or Purple for some drunchies.

Finally, the wine itself. Here are few of our favorites to check out:

DeLille Cellars

Known for their Doyenne and Grand Ciel, plus several other fantastic blends, they also participate in a cork recycling program.

Betz Family Winery 

Known for the Rhone-inspired wines, any bottle of Syrah from the Betz family will have you swooning.

Efeste

Home of the bold Tough Guy Bordeaux and the reasonable (and ever so delicious) Final Final Red Blend.

Januik/Novelty Hill

A fan of red and white? Januik/Novelty Hill produces both. As a bonus, you can score some delicious brick oven pizza here.

If that’s not enough to whet your whistle, use this map as a resource. Enjoy your trip to Seattle’s favorite boozy backyard, and bottoms up. Cheers!

Still thirsty? Check out The SunBreak for more arts, culture, food & drink, and the like. Go on, make our day. 

Climate Change May Put Washington Wineries on the March

“Wine Economist” Mike Veseth points his fans toward this climate change video based on research by Conservation International and the Environmental Defense Fund. In it, reds denote where wine grapes currently thrive, green means the wine-song remains the same, and blue indicates where new viticultural areas could develop. Clearly, now is the time to snatch up that land in Okanogan, Ferry, Stevens, and Pend Oreille Counties.

“Bear in mind that forecasting is difficult, especially about the future, so projections shouldn’t be confused with fact,” admonishes Veseth, but on the other hand (he is an economist, after all) wine grapes have already proven exquisitely sensitive to climate change, for better or for worse.

As it is, “growing season temperatures have increased for most of the world’s high quality wine regions over the last 50 years, by an average of 2 ºC,” writes Jamie Goode, and already there have been winners and losers. Though the higher temperature tracks an increase in vintage quality over the corresponding years, wine growers in California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys complain that “the climate has become so warm that ripening fruit is not an issue, but retaining acidity and developing flavor have become increasingly difficult.”

With the wine industry being the global juggernaut that it is, with estimates of size in 2014 at more than $292 billion, studies have been flying that attempt to forecast where, geographically, the best investments should be made. In 2011, a Stanford study concluded that by 2039:

In Napa the average temperature could increase by more than 1˚C, with the number of ‘very hot’ days going up by 10. As a result, the amount of land suitable for growing Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay would shrink by half. There would be slight increase in suitable land In Willamette Valley in Oregon, but in Columbia Valley in Washington there would be a 30 percent reduction.

Wine growers do have options besides migration — they can plant more heat-tolerant varieties, or invest in ways to reduce the heat the plants are exposed to. But the more recent study notes that access to water for irrigation and for cooling will also be a point of contention. Using the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) database for their climate modeling, the researchers forecast that:

Area suitable for viticulture decreases 25 to 73 percent in major wine producing regions by 2050 in the higher RCP 8.5 concentration pathway and 19 to 62 percent in the lower RCP 4.5.

Essentially, the Mediterranean-style climate so suitable for wine production would leave the Mediterranean: “Large newly suitable areas are projected in regions of Northern Europe and western North America. Ensemble mean increases in suitable area are 231 percent in western North America and 99 percent in Northern Europe in RCP 8.5.” Australia’s loss becomes New Zealand’s gain.

This concerns Conservation International because the obvious migratory response is to seek either higher elevations or higher latitudes, which in many cases would put new vineyards in proximity with wildlife and wilderness. (That’s without mentioning the tendency for wine regions to become monocultural — prior to the Judgment of Paris, the Napa Valley was home to a substantial number of fruit and nut orchards, which have since been uprooted.)

Economist Veseth, the author of Wine Wars, has a new book coming out called Extreme Wine. He’s traveled the world, the blurb says, on the track of the “best, worst, cheapest, most expensive, and most over-priced wines.” You’ll find discussions of wines created by celebrities, wine booms and busts, and wine-tourism. It comes out this October, but you can pre-order now.

A New Hawaii Beckons Visitors From the Beach

A Royal Hawaiian scene

A few weeks ago, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Hawaii invited us down to lunch at Tom Douglas’s Palace Kitchen to chew the poi, metaphorically. (It wasn’t on our lunch menu, but you can imagine how excited I was to see the Kitchen serves “troll-caught Neah Bay king salmon,” until someone explained to me the relevant fishing terminology.)

I was there despite never having visited Hawaii–or rather, because I have never visited Hawaii, and was curious if I was missing something. I have nothing against Hawaii, and Facebook tells me that many of my friends really enjoy the place, but it just seems odd to fly out to the middle of the ocean and try to land on a volcano. Clearly, you’re tempting fate. Besides, I am not a surfer, though I appreciate their work.

But Hawaii has not been content to leave it at that. There was that The Descendants movie. The Hawaii 5-0 reboot. Hawaii is back. So, all right, I went down and took notes. First, yes, the film is that popular, and people really are arriving in Hawaii wanting to recreate The Descendants shoot. The complications of the plot–questions of family, legacy, ecology–are not unrelated to Starwood Hawaii’s marketing strategy, it would turn out. Less so, Hawaii 5-0, though I would think that catching sight of Grace Park in a bikini is a tourism industry no-brainer.

I don’t know if they were putting me on, but the message was that Hawaii, like many baby-boomers, is starting to wonder what’s truly important, what is enduring and what won’t last. What’s worth passing on to new generations. (It is true that the Starwood team were the nicest people, and that’s saying something because, you know, Seattle. We know nice. I didn’t even mind the lei.) Now, I am sure that if you want to spend a great deal of money in pampered luxury, never moving more than arm’s-length from your beach daiquiri, Hawaii still has you covered. How about an 1,800-square-foot suite with butler service? That’s the St. Regis Princeville Resort.

But Starwood, I learned, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations of its eleven properties on the islands, partly to keep up with the luxe vacation arms race (there’s a Sheraton app for that), but also to make its properties more appealing to families with tweens and teens (the Broadway-style musical Honu by the Sea, starring a sea turtle, just opened at the Royal Hawaiian) and to people for whom travel means adventures; immersion, not escape; and who are concerned about leaving footprints. There are also ukelele lessons; I’m not sure which category that falls into.

Besides the infinity pools, waterslides, and snorkeling-with-dolphins, there are heritage and cultural tours that help to develop a sense of place, whether you’re visiting lava flows or tropical forests or sailing in a Hawaiian canoe.

A leading way to commune with the locals anywhere is through food. Hawaii is home to coffee and vanilla companies, of course. Kona Brewing has been around since 1995, Maui Brewing since 2005 (try the coconut porter). How about a Hawaiian vodka? Hawaii’s beekeepers keep a list of honey pots you can try to get your paw into. The Volcano Island Honey Co. is recommended by people in the know; they do farm tours as well.

If you’re staying at an ocean villa, you might want to drop in at a farmers market or two, or three, but Starwood also has a farm-to-table program at their property restaurants.

The Kapalua Wine & Food Festival was in June on Maui. This fall, September 6 through 9, 2012, Oahu is home to the Hawaii Food & Wine Festival, co-founded by two James Beard Award-winning chefs, Roy Yamaguchi and Alan Wong. (I’m told that the low season in Hawaii is the weekend after Thanksgiving, and just before and after Christmas.)

In Hawaii, the question of sustainability isn’t abstract–any island confronts resource use differently, with more urgency, than sprawling continents. Having a continental breakfast delivered to your door could well mean having the food shipped out from the continent, depending on what can be sourced locally. Starwood, which hopes to have all of its properties LEED-certified within the next two years, has a “sustainability champion” at each property.

Reading Up on Wine Wars with Wine Economist Mike Veseth

Back in early November, the World Affairs Council in Seattle invited University of Puget Sound professor Mike Veseth up to give a talk on the geopolitical stakes concerning…wine–which if nothing else gave participating in the post-talk wine tasting a feeling of due diligence. Membership in WAC is $60 for an individual, and in return you get invited to events like this, or, coming up in January, Dr. Steven A. Cook’s talk on “Egypt and the Arab Spring, One Year Later.”

In person, Veseth, even with a slight cold, transmitted an exuberance that illustrated why he was named “Washington Professor of the Year 2010.” I don’t want to stereotype, so let’s just say that, in a gathering of economists, Veseth would be known as the “high-energy one.” (He blogs with punny vitality at his wineeconomist.com site–read his take on the Costco initiative.) His talk that night was based on his new book, Wine Wars (Amazon), in which he discusses:

…major forces that are redrawing the world wine map: globalization, which presents wine consumers with a confusing “embarrassment of riches,” the “miracle of Two Buck Chuck,” which simplifies wine choice but threatens to over-simplify wine itself by turning it into a commodity, and the “terroirists” who Veseth hopes will save wine’s soul.

“This book will interest not only oenophiles but also general readers following the global economy or market analysis,” said Library Journal, and I’m here to vouch for the truth of that. I was interested enough by Veseth’s talk to buy the book, and there’s never a dull moment in its 225 pages. It’s being featured in Wine Spectator magazine’s “Top 100” issue and it was just named the “best American wine book of 2011 in the history category” at the Gourmand International Wine Book Awards.

Mike Veseth

Certainly if you’re a wine drinker–“oenophile” makes me visualize a trilobite-looking creature–this book provides a valuable education about what you think you’re buying, and who you’re buying it from. Veseth pulls back the curtain on an ongoing “bargain wine revolution,” talking about the provenance of Trader Joe’s beloved Two Buck Chuck, and how conglomerates without house brands have bought their way into an assortment of once-local brands.

As an economist, Veseth doesn’t feel compelled to take sides in the globalization “debate.” Wine Wars is in no small part a history book, chronicling how wine’s reach has spread for centuries: “The Romans brought wine to Britain along with their empire’s troops and religious practices, although the local wine, produced at monasteries as far north as York, could not have been very good.” Today what we have are surplus “lakes” of wine that taste just fine, if not particularly reminiscent of any patch of ground: wine for every day use.

And for everyone who sniffs at wine in Tetrapaks, Veseth reminds readers that bottles with corks were once high-tech. Now, it’s 24,000-liter, single-use plastic bladders that fill shipping containers, and allow global shipping of wine without the extra cost of shipping those heavy glass bottles. “Increasingly,” writes Veseth, “it pays to read the fine print on wine labels. […] I have seen ‘California’ wine brands that contain Pinot Noir from Chile, Northern Italy, and France.”

So there is a great deal of wine talk, yes. Veseth keeps up to date on everything wine, apparently, so he’s referring you to films like Sideways and Mondovino, and reviewing wine magazines and their critics, as much as he’s sniffing at the contents of glasses.

But if you’re into retail sociology, you’re in luck, too. Veseth deconstructs the grocery store “wine wall” for you, discussing why wines are classified as they are, why they are top or bottom shelf, who buys those wine jugs, and where those handwritten “shelf talkers” come from. On a macro scale, there’s the sociology of hard discounters, and their success and failure in different markets (Or, How Aldi Nord Became Trader Joe’s). Equally fascinating is his recounting of the struggle for Western winemaking to gain a foothold in China, in which we learn that the palate wants what it wants.

Late in the book, even climate change gets consideration. Because grapes are so sensitive to growing conditions, vineyards keep careful track of them. That’s how we know that: “Average vineyard temperatures rose between 1950 and 1999 by more than 1.5 degreees Celsius in California’s Napa Valley, Washington’s Columbia Valley, and Italy’s Chianti region, for example.” With this trend in mind, the rise of Washington’s wine industry seems to have a fair wind to thank–but winds can change direction:

It is estimated that climate change is likely to push today’s terroir toward the poles by between 280 and 500 km (about 200 to 300 miles) by 2050. The impact of climate change wont’ be as simple as just moving north, but it will be just as disruptive–perhaps even more so, since rising temperatures (and shifting latitudes) are not the whole story. Climate change also brings increasingly unstable weather patterns and longer growing seasons (more days between the last frost of spring and the first one of winter). One study indicates that the frost-free period for the North Coast region of California increased by sixty-eight days between 1949 and 2002.

But then, this is exactly why people get into wine, isn’t it? It’s one of those primordial substances that seems to have all of life life balled up inside it. Once vineyards were planted by Romans; now wine is stocked at Tesco, Wal-Mart, and Costco.

Ring in Oyster New Year This Saturday at Elliott’s

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Oysters! (All photos Peter Majerle.)

But of course, one must start with some oyster wines. Would you like a pinot gris, a sauvingon blanc, or a pinot grigio?

You really can't go wrong. Here, let me pour you a glass of the pinot grigio.

Be sure to study the menu carefully.

See? There's a lot to choose from.

Oysters served with alder-smoked apples and pepper bacon, and done up Rockefeller-style, with spinach, bacon, and hollandaise.

A plate of seafood and a glass of white wine. What more does one need?

Audrey's typically hazy oysterface.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Oyster New Year at Elliott’s Oyster House this Saturday, November 12th, starting at 5:00 p.m.

Your entry fee ain’t cheap ($95, and the $125 VIP tix are already sold out), but it gets you tons of seafood and booze, as well as the good feeling that comes from helping to restore the Henderson Inlet shellfish-growing region in South Puget Sound.

Along with being a benefit, it’s also the biggest oyster party on the West Coast, with more than thirty varieties of local oysters shucked to order and a seafood buffet with just about everything you can think of (geoduck tartare, anyone?). Get a taste of what to expect in the photo gallery above. There’s also live music, microbrews care of Pike Place Brewing, Boundary Bay, and Maritime Pacific, and vino from over forty wineries from Washington State, Oregon, and beyond.

Oyster New Year offers up so much to do that you might want to eat and drink yourself sick while tweeting your good time with the hashtag #ONY. Don’t miss out on the oyster luge, which is an impressive interactive eating experience, especially after a few glasses of wine, and be sure to cast your vote for the most beautiful oyster. As always, beauty is in the eye of the bivalve beholder.