Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
    Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
    Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
    Ebook207 pages3 hours

    Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History

    By Catie McIntyre Walker and Dr. Myles J. Anderson

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    As early as the 1840s, French settlers brought their knowledge of wine to Washington's Walla Walla Valley. The highly fertile soil and abundant water were perfect complements to their Old World winemaking traditions, halted only by Prohibition and the historically unmerciful weather conditions. A century after the first settlers arrived, the area's wine industry reestablished itself when new pioneers like the Italian Pesciallos and Leonettis opened wineries in the early and mid-1900s, a trade that continues to thrive today. Discover the southeastern portion of the Washington Territory along Lewis and Clark's trail in a whole new light with the trailblazing vintners of the Walla Walla wine industry. Taste the history in every glass with wine writer and Walla Walla native Catie McIntyre Walker as she unearths the valley's transformation from Wild West to world-class wine region.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateNov 18, 2014
    ISBN9781625846235
    Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History
    Author

    Catie McIntyre Walker

    Catie McIntyre Walker is a native of Walla Walla and the original local wine blogger, known as the "Wild Walla Walla Wine Woman," since 2005. A graduate of the Institute for Enology and Viticulture at Walla Walla, Catie has written for Walla Walla Lifestyles magazine and various other Northwest lifestyle and wine publications. She is the author of Wines of Walla Walla Valley: A Deep-Rooted History (published by The History Press). Find her blogging at passementaries.blogspot.com and catiemcintyre.com.

    Related to Wines of Walla Walla Valley

    Related ebooks

    Beverages For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Whiskey Travel

      Apr 29, 2022

      Whiskey is a community, and a lovely one at that. Many people call the bonds between whiskey lovers the “whiskey fabric” or “whiskey fam”, and it’s easy to see why. When you get a group of whiskey-loving folks together, their enthusiasm transcends al

      3 min read

    • Article

      Rum’s Renaissance

      Aug 14, 2018

      Rum’s Renaissance
      3 min read

    • Article

      Robert M Parker Jr

      Jul 1, 2020

      Robert M Parker Jr
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Future Of Wine Tourism

      Jul 20, 2021

      The Future Of Wine Tourism
      5 min read

    • Article

      Burgundy's Existential Challenge

      Mar 15, 2022

      Burgundy's Existential Challenge
      6 min read

    • Article

      But First, Champagne

      Dec 5, 2023

      But First, Champagne
      5 min read

    • Article

      Bordeaux Is La Place

      Jan 1, 2022

      BORDEAUX’S unique trading system, called ‘la place’, is becoming something of a magnet for non-Bordeaux high profile producers wanting to tap into the global sales and distribution network that la place offers. You’d be forgiven for thinking that la

      4 min read

    • Article

      WINE & TECH

      Mar 26, 2019

      WINE & TECH
      15 min read

    • Article

      Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40

      Aug 23, 2019

      Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40
      14 min read

    • Article

      Batching It Big

      May 3, 2021

      Batching It Big
      4 min read

    • Article

      Premium Spanish Fizz

      Feb 3, 2021

      Until the turn of the century, understanding Spanish sparkling wine was easy. Spain produced a single category, Cava, which was mostly, but not only, from Catalonia. Cava used to be cheap and cheerful, cheaper than Champagne and better quality than C

      6 min read

    • Article

      Eat, Read, Travel

      Oct 19, 2021

      Eat, Read, Travel
      3 min read

    • Article

      Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40

      Aug 24, 2021

      Wine Enthusiast 40 Under 40
      16 min read

    • Article

      Wine Enthusiast's Future 40 List

      Aug 30, 2022

      Wine Enthusiast's Future 40 List
      17 min read

    • Article

      The Sake Resurrection

      Oct 19, 2021

      The Sake Resurrection
      9 min read

    • Article

      Albariño versus Alvarinho

      Aug 4, 2021

      Albariño is a seasoned traveller. Recently licensed in Bordeaux, you’ll also find it in Uruguay, New Zealand, California and southern France. Yet nowhere does it better than the northwest of the Iberian peninsula, where it’s an ancient variety. For t

      9 min read

    • Article

      Go Ask Alice

      May 10, 2018

      Go Ask Alice
      7 min read

    • Article

      Your ‘I Do’ How-to

      Nov 1, 2022

      Your ‘I Do’ How-to
      3 min read

    • Article

      SUPER TUSCANS at 50

      Jan 5, 2022

      SUPER TUSCANS at 50
      12 min read

    • Article

      Cabernet Kingdom

      Jul 21, 2020

      Cabernet Kingdom
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sustainability In Chilean Wine

      Mar 4, 2020

      As in other areas of the world, most of Chile’s vineyards are located in regions with defined seasons. Dry summers are followed by seasonal rains that begin only in the autumn, providing a good natural framework for growing healthy vines. However, in

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Future of Wine

      Mar 1, 2014

      The Future of Wine
      2 min read

    • Article

      50 Wine Restaurants We Love 2021

      Jul 20, 2021

      50 Wine Restaurants We Love 2021
      2 min read

    • Article

      Down In The Dirt

      Feb 2, 2021

      Down In The Dirt
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Neuroscience of Wine: Why our minds can be led astray about the tastes of wines.

      Feb 18, 2016

      Galileo Galilei is best known for his novel way of looking at Earth’s place in the solar system and his consequent problems with the Vatican. But long before all the fuss blew up over his cosmology, Galileo told us that while the physical attributes

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Wines of Walla Walla Valley

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Wines of Walla Walla Valley - Catie McIntyre Walker

      Alliance.

      1

      WELTER AND WASTE

      In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and a powerful wind hovering over the waters, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light…[and] dry land and seas and plants and trees which grew fruit with seed.

      —Book of Genesis

      The highly diverse geology of Washington State is proof there was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and a powerful wind was hovering over the waters. This state, located in the Northwest, has been the stage for intrusions of igneous and metamorphic rocks, volcanic activity, mountain-building episodes, erosion and massive flooding events. Today, the wind still hovers over the majestic waters of the Columbia River just above Wallula Gap in Walla Walla County in the southeastern part of the state.

      Throughout the dry land of the state, there are indeed trees growing fruit with seed, the same forbidden fruit with origins in the Garden of Eden, and today producing over 60 percent of the nation’s apples. In the Book of Genesis a patriarch named Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first man to have planted a vineyard bearing clusters of fruit with seed. Vineyards were also planted in the state of Washington as early as 1825 and have been planted since, with over forty-four thousand acres as of 2011.

      Over ten million years ago, a vast area that is now known as the Columbia Basin, located in eastern Washington, was engulfed with one of the largest basaltic lava floods ever to appear on the earth, covering sixty-three thousand square miles of the Pacific Northwest. The hot and angry lava flowed, reaching a thickness of more than twelve thousand feet. The molten rock erupted as the crust of the earth subsided, creating a broad, depressed lava plain.

      Most of the flows were extruded near the southeast corner of the state east of Walla Walla County. Many of these fluid trails of lava traveled as far as the Pacific Ocean, guided by the ancestral Columbia River drainage. The hardened lava flows were eventually sculpted by erosion, stones were deposited, lakebeds and natural dams were formed and forests grew.

      In the southeast corner of Washington and the northeastern part of Oregon, 4,060 square miles of a broad uplift of basalt lava created a subprovince of the Columbia Basin, known as the Blue Mountains. The highest peak of the mountain range is 9,108 feet. Today the Blue Mountains are drained by several rivers, including the Grande Ronde and Tucannon, tributaries of the Snake River, as well as the forks of the John Day, Umatilla and Walla Walla Rivers, which are tributaries of the great Columbia.

      In time, the lava cooled and solidified into basalt throughout the Columbia Basin, including the area of the Walla Walla River. Then, the floods came.

      Thousands of years later, expeditions and early settlers traveling from the east of the continent would take note that the rugged and severely eroded landscapes in eastern Washington were quite unusual and different from any other land they had seen. The cataclysmic series of floods—named after Lake Missoula and also known as the Spokane Floods or Bretz Floods (named after geologist J. Harlen Bretz, who first recognized evidence of these catastrophic floods and referred to them as the Spokane Floods in the 1920s)—left behind proof that an ice age had occurred.

      These violent natural floods, which caused great upheaval, destruction and fundamental change to significant ways of life in the region, took place during the last ice age over twelve thousand years ago.

      The glacial prehistoric Lake Missoula, located in what is now the western state of Montana, was originally a body of water that was as large as half the size of Lake Michigan. Lake Missoula measured about three thousand square miles and contained five cubic miles of water. The sequences of floods occurred about forty times during a two-thousand-year period and swept like tsunamis across Washington and Idaho. The speed of the floods reached sixty-two miles per hour, and the great glacial lake of Missoula would be drained in periods as short as two

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1