Washington
The No. 2 US wine state by volume and a spiritual home of cabernet sauvignon and merlot — highly structured, deeply flavoured reds and inspired rieslings, grown in the arid east behind the Cascades.
About the region
Most of the world's classic grapes grow in many places, but each has a spiritual home where it ascends beyond merely good; in the 1990s Washington State emerged, to most wine drinkers' surprise, as one of the great spiritual homes of cabernet sauvignon and merlot. The phenomenon was startling, since barely a dozen years earlier growers had pinned their hopes on gewürztraminer, chardonnay and other whites — which still make good wine there, but nothing like the top tier of cabernets and merlots. By the late 1990s two more grapes captured growers' imaginations: riesling and syrah. By the late 2000s Washington was a leading US source of riesling and had become a hotbed of fantastic, rich, complex syrahs the equal of any grown in the United States. What one notices immediately about the greatest Washington cabernets and merlots, or blends of the two, is the CONCENTRATION of the wines — as if by some magical osmosis they had been infused with the primal, lush berryness of wild Northwest blackberries, boysenberries, raspberries and cherries. The state ranks second in US wine production, after California, and is one of the few places in the country — or the world — where many vines grow on their own roots rather than phylloxera-tolerant rootstocks. Virtually all of its vineyards lie not in the rainy west near Seattle but in the arid, almost desert-like eastern part of the state: the massive Cascade range is so effective a rain shield that eastern and western Washington are about as similar in appearance as Montana and Vermont. There are thirteen AVAs, the three most prominent being the gigantic Columbia Valley and, within it, Yakima Valley and Walla Walla Valley.
