Winter 2001, Premier Issue

That personality obviously stands out in the Gordons’ wine. The Gordon Brothers 1998 Tradition, an estate blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah, won first place in a blind tasting of prestigious Washington, French, and Napa Valley wines this past March in San Francisco. Washington wines also took second (DeLille Cellars), third (Col Solare), and sixth (Quilceda Creek) places. Interestingly, even at $40, the Tradition was the least expensive of the first eight. The ’96 Mouton-Rothschild, which placed eighth, goes for $278 a bottle. Washington winemakers like to point out the good value of their wines.

Jeff is quick to note that the top three places were a dead heat. His point reflects an observation you hear a lot among wine people in Washington. They like each other. What they are about is not just Gordon Brothers wine or Woodward Canyon wine or Chateau Ste. Michelle wine, but Washington wine.

After graduating from WSU, Jeff worked for an agribusiness outfit, an experience that he found deadening, and which led the Gordons to look for land. Vicki recalls Jeff’s bringing her to the spot where their house now stands, even before the land was for sale. She was stunned by its beauty. When the land came available in 1979, they quickly worked out a deal and started planning.

Part of that planning involved a visit to the site by WSU horticulturist Walt Clore.

Forty years ago not everyone would have looked at the terroirs of Eastern Washington and seen wine. Walt Clore was among the few who did.

Though many call him the “father of Washington wine,” vines were planted in Washington long before Walt Clore was born. The first Vitis vinifera, the premium European vines, were probably planted by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver in 1825. Around the same time, French trappers might have planted vinifera vines in the Walla Walla Valley. Other European settlers across the state undoubtedly brought their seeds or cuttings with them, unwilling to abandon their wine to memory.

But Washington did not see its first bonded winery until 1933, immediately following the repeal of Prohibition: St. Charles Winery on Puget Sound’s Stretch Island west of Tacoma. By 1938, Washington had 42 wineries. But most of the wines produced during this era were fortified, sweet dessert wines.

What Clore was able to do was assure Washington farmers that vinifera would grow in Washington. Without his revelationsÊand a little legal persuasion from CaliforniaÊthe products of Washington’s wine industry would still be relegatedÊwith some exceptionsÊto the same shelf as Mogen David and Wild Irish Rose. They certainly wouldn’t dominate the wine lists of restaurants such as New Orleans’s Dominique’s.

Walt Clore came to Washington State College in 1934, following the lure of a $500 fellowship and fleeing the Depression and a life in the Oklahoma oil refineries. Prohibition had been repealed six months earlier.

In 1937, Clore was appointed assistant horticulturist at WSU’s research center in Prosser, now called the Irrigated Agriculture Research Center. He was the third faculty member on staff at the center and began working with tree fruits and small fruitsÊincluding grapes.

Clore immediately started grape variety trials at Prosser. Over the years he tested 250 American, European, and hybrid grapes. He had the grapes. He had the ideas. He saw the potential. All he needed was a partner for his grand vision to reach fruition.

He had to wait 30 years after beginning his work in Prosser before that partner came along. Arriving in Pullman in 1960, Chas Nagel joined the science department as a microbiologist. Coming from the Napa Valley, where he grew up just down the street from Louis Martini and where his father sold grapes to the Napa Valley Coop, he knew a little about winemaking. So Clore asked him to help evaluate his grapes.

Nagel offered to make some wines and run a taste panel. Soon afterward, George Carter joined the team in Prosser as the winemaker. Consulting with Nagel, he would make the wines in Prosser, then send them up to Pullman for analysis.

“Folwell did the economics, Chas headed up the winemaking, and I grew the grapes,” says Clore.

All this led finally to Clore’s magnum opus. With Nagel and Carter, he published in 1976, the year he retired from WSU, the prosaically titled, Ten Years of Grape Variety Responses and Wine-Making Trials in Central Washington. The publication consists mostly of crop yields, analytical data, and taste panel results, meticulously compiled over the decade. But the message was clear:

If hardier varieties free of diseases are used and the best cultural practices known to obtain full vine maturity are followed, it is feasible to grow European grapes in favorable sites in south central Washington.

Lab analysis will tell you one thing, says Cheryl Barber-Jones, but taste is altogether different.

French oak lends a little of its flavor to that of Washington's terroir