Our Place in Walla Walla #17: Wine

Our place loves grapes.

This past weekend, you may have noticed extra traffic in town and around our community as Walla Walla hosted the annual Spring Release weekend, with thousands of people visiting town to participate in dozens of special events, tastings and other wine-related festivities. Demonstrating the loyalty of fans of Walla Walla and our wines, the Union-Bulletin noted that visitors are returning in increasing numbers to this event each year.

To be clear, not everything in Walla Walla is about wine. As part of a growing regional trend to offer alternative beverage options, many local non-alcoholic sipping products exist like bubbly rose and mocktails, and we even have a travel planning company called Zero Proof Walla Walla.

Having said that, wine is a large part of our local economy and community (a wonderful quick history, starting with the Missoula Floods, is here). According to our local tourism office, Walla Walla has more than 130 wineries consisting of 2,900 acres of planted vineyards and those numbers grow every year. The value of this is significant: An excellent 2022 Wire story on this topic cited a 2019 study estimating “total sales of $430 million, labor income of $114 million and 2,484 jobs generated in the local economy in relation to wine production, tasting rooms and winery visitation.”

Local wines consistently win regional, national and international awards and Walla Walla was the first community in the United States to win US Today’s America’s Best Wine Region award for three consecutive years.

Nearly every travel story in the last twenty years about Walla Walla references wine.

It seems like every week there’s significant news about the local wine scene (last week’s top story was about Martin Fujishin being named the new Director of College Cellars and the Enology and Viticulture Program at Walla Walla Community College—a significant force in the region.) Recently stories about Walla Walla have also addressed Black-owned wineries, minority wine makers and customers, celebrity wineries, women winemakers and even climate change (this topic was already on the mind of then-Whitman Professor Karl Storchmann, now at NYU, as seen in his 2006 column in Forbes.) And, in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month it’s worth celebrating local superstar Hong King-born Fiona Mak!

Whitman College has numerous connections to the local wine community which this recent feature in our alumni magazine describes. In addition, Whitman collects materials about the history of the wine sector in the Archives at Penrose Library and in the summer we have hosted a Wine and Tennis Camp.

Students sometimes work in tasting rooms and in vineyards. They have auctioned wine to raise funds for local non-profit partners. They have terrific internships at local wine-adjacent organizations like the Alie Zagata ’20 had with non-profit VITAL Wines (founded by Ashley Trout ‘03) which she then built on for her honors thesis work. In an insightful 2020 Wire story about Whitties working in wine, then-student Noah Dunn ’21 reflected on his job as a tasting room associate at Long Shadows Winery, “I’m an environmental studies student, environmental humanities specifically, so [I’m] thinking about the stories we tell about the places we live and how we live in them. And once I started thinking about it, that’s kinda exactly what wine is about…”

It’s not just students, either. Professor of Geology Kevin Pogue, a self-proclaimed terroirist, has advised local winemakers and helped create new wine regions.

To “harvest” insight about the local wine community, I reached out to a Whitman-connected expert and here’s what she thinks students would enjoy knowing.

Devyani Gupta ’15 (Spanish, Psychology) is the Winemaker & Viticulturist at Valdemar Estates, a 5th-generation family winery founded in Spain that features the first 100% Inclusive & Accessible Tasting Room in the USA. Devyani reflected:

“The local wine industry adds to the community ‘eco-system,’ which Whitman college is a part of. Wine is a blend of art, science, and a whole lot of machinery. There is also a long standing history of Whitties working in wine. Liberal arts educations require a multi-disciplinary focus and hybrid learning—even if you are a science major, you will give a presentation to your peers no less than once per term. While Whitman may not have a winemaking degree, the soft skills of a liberal arts education prepare you for many roles. I personally feel that my public speaking skills were best honed at Whitman, and have allowed me to feel comfortable addressing a room or holding a seat at a table for larger discussions on boards and leadership panels.”

In conclusion, I hope that all Whitman community members are able to raise a glass of your favorite age-appropriate beverage to celebrate the end of the school year. If you’re over 21, this Thursday evening, Whitman alumna and winemaker Meredith Hyslop ’05 will be hosting a tasting of spring and summer wines at 5 p.m. at the Thief on Main Street right next to the almost-finished Heritage Park (which you learned about last September).

Wishing you all a strong finish to this incredible year!