Thanksgiving in Wine Country

A Pleasant Place with Pleasant People

Taste & See: I plan to write a little more about a few of the specific wineries visited, along with notes on what we ate & drank [and what you could make to approximate the pairings], but first I want to introduce you to the site of my Food & Wine Weekend, a 5,000 person town in Eastern Washington.

Prosser has come along way from being founded by a special agent of the interior, Colonel William Farrand Prosser, in 1882. The Chamber of Commerce (photo below, courtesy) boasts of "old-fashioned light poles and cobbled sidewalks" and "tree-lined streets," cradled by a "peaceful river meandering through the velvet hills."


Velvet hills might be stretching it, but irrigation of the surrounding hills with water from the meandering river, along with the nearly sunny days a year, has made for a thriving agriculture community. As the "Birthplace of the Washington Wine Industry," the agriculture boon includes, of course, grapes for wine. Wine and agriculture permeate everything. For example, the Yellow Rose Nursery, where my mom buys oodles of plants (which thrive in the nearly 300 days of sunshine and the tending of which kept me employed throughout high school) was naturally home to a wine-tasting over the weekend.



The wine being poured at Yellow Rose, a special series by Heaven's Cave Cellars for the Make the Dash Count foundation:


The country-agriculture-down home theme is also quite the trope for all manner of wine-packaging. The picture below is from the Snoqualmie tasting room, featuring posters off a new series of labels.


The whole town is rather charming, though having grown up there I may be biased. Then again, who doesn't love pirouetting bush-statues? (These are from the lawn across from the Wine-makers loft, pictured below.) You have to love the whimsical touch.


I don't think I was able to appreciate this charm as well when I was living there as a child. (To think I ran along those tree-lined cobbled sidewalks on a regular basis pondering not their charm but of the number of blocks left to complete in my run. What a tragic waste of beauty!)

It may be that the town itself has made a more conscious effort, hosting as it does increasing numbers of wine visitors every year. Or it may simply be that coming from Manhattan, the charm of a 5,000 person town surrounded by rolling hills and open sky, where my parents know the wine-makers and the neighbors send over a bottle of port in exchange for a cup of sugar [this actually happened while I was home for Thanksgiving] is naturally amplified. Either way, I'm excited to present some snapshots of Thanksgiving in Wine Country, hub of the up & coming wine industry in Eastern Washington and the place that will always be, in some way, home.

In eager expectation of the coming boom, or at least the next wave of the existing boom, and in response to the prohibitively high start-up costs inherent in making good wine, Prosser has seen the growth of targeted wine-making & wine-enjoying investments. The recently renamed North Prosser Business Park (now called "Vinters' Village), pictured below, is a perfect example, containing a number of beautiful new wineries, and new tasting rooms for a few established wineries, in walking distance-- definitely a good thing if you plan on tasting wine at more than a few of them.


Within the larger area of the Vinters' Village is the "Winemakers Loft," an incubator for up to seven small wineries. Much of the equipment is shared but each winery gets its own tasting room. It works out well for visitors: tour buses can park at one convenient spot and while the Seattlites meander from tasting room to tasting room (much like the river meandering around the velvet hills) the bus-drivers can amuse themselves by admiring the pirouetting bushes next door.




I actually think this is a marvelous idea. For roughly the cost of a New York Law Firm Summer Associate's salary, one can pay a year's rent in the loft & get started on a little something, all one's own. The fee includes enough equipment for each studio winemaker to produce about 1,000 cases: a 1,000 gallon stainless steel tank for fermenting, racking, blending & bottling the wine, and two 500 gallon tanks in the loft's central room, one for red & one for white. And of course, the 1,000 square feet studio with a tasting room in front, and a barrel & storage room in the back. Anyone want to go into the wine-making business with me? You can crush the grapes and chat with the tourist and I'll whip up a little something in the kitchen to match whatever you're pouring.



The barrel room above belongs to Coyote Canyon, as does the cheery scene below.


From inside Yellow Rose Nursery:


It is not, of course, unique to this town that Thanksgiving is turning point for Christmas decorations. But the wineries provide a particularly good venue for a certain folksy, country-style, dare I use the word again, charm.

From Willow Crest:


Christmas lights abound and candles, casting a warm glow in the cozy tasting rooms & reflecting beautifully off the hundreds of bottles of wine in luscious jewel tones.

From Coyote Canyon:




From Willow Crest:

From Snoqualmie:


Even the barrel rooms, typically spaces more akin to a factory production floor than a showroom, as seen in Thurston Wolfe's barrel room below, got into the spirit.


At Thurston Wolfe:



At Willow Crest:

The night falls on a long day of wine-tasting. From the picnic area at Snoqualmie:


There is highway sign on "Wine Country Road" off the second of the two freeway exits announcing the town motto: "a pleasant place with pleasant people." The town is home to more than 30 wineries, and it turns out, the wineries are filled with pleasant people, pouring very pleasant wine, which made for a very pleasant place indeed.