Walla Walla: Tasting at Historic Wineries in Lowden

This is one in a series of posts about our recent trip to Walla Walla over a long weekend. It covers breakfast on Sunday morning and our wine tastings at two historic Walla Walla wineries in Lowden west of town: Woodward Canyon and L'École 41, the second and third wineries respectively in Walla Walla.

Sunday morning came too early for me. The coffee station for the second floor of our inn was located just outside our room door and some inconsiderate and unthinking person decided that 6:30am was an appropriate time on a Sunday morning to make a bunch of racket while making coffee. Fortunately, Ann slept through it and finally awoke around 8.

Knowing once again that lunch would not be in our future, we started our morning at Ann's other selection for breakfast, Maple Counter Cafe, not a hundred yards from where we were staying. We were seated outside fairly quickly, most other patrons preferring to sit inside, where the walls were decorated in all manner of country kitsch. Our breakfast from the vast menu was OK, nothing to wax poetic about, but better than our breakfast the previous day.

Biscuit, Gravy, and Eggs

Woodward Canyon

After breakfast, we were meeting the group at 11am at Woodward Canyon, just a few miles west outside of town. By coincidence, Woodward Canyon was the first Washington State wine that I ever tasted. As a young man in the mid-1980s, I would take the metro in from my home in suburban Maryland to buy bottles at Calvert-Woodley located near the National Zoo in NW Washington DC. Woodward Canyon wine, like all Washington State wine, was something of a unicorn back at that time period, a rarity for certain.

On arrival, after we drove past next door neighbor L'École 41 to the Woodward Canyon parking lot, we were very confused about where the tasting room was. We first tried going into the modern glassed-in building that looks like a tasting room, but it was closed. We wandered to the other side of that building and saw a couple tasting wine under an umbrella behind a tiny little farmhouse next door. They told us that the farmhouse was the tasting room and so Ann and I, the first to arrive, went into the building via the back door, startling the woman behind the counter who was notable for being 6'-3" tall, almost my height.

The model pretty former college soccer goalie asked us to pick a table out back for our tasting. Dimitri and crew arrived in short order and equally confused as Ann and I were, they also attempted to enter the locked events center. We managed to flag them down and they wandered over to our table behind the farmhouse.

Woodward Canyon offers two different equally priced tasting menus and our server was very cool about just bringing out all the bottles and letting us choose which wines we wanted to taste, rather than sticking strictly to a prescribed tasting. Between the two of us, Ann and I tasted all the wines on both menus. We ended up buying a mixed case of wines to take back to Oregon with us, including a delicious Sauvignon Blanc.

After we tasted, our server offered us the chance to see their library in the basement of the modern building next door, the one that we attempted to enter thinking that it was the tasting room. I have to admit that it was very impressive to see wines going all the way back to the beginning of Woodward Canyon's history, the 1981 vintage. Very impressive indeed and what a beautiful space!

Hummingbird Moth on Red Valerian

L'École No. 41

Next and final stop on our agenda for Sunday afternoon was the third oldest winery in the Walla Walla Valley, L'École No. 41, next door neighbor to Woodward Canyon. The winery is named after the old Frenchtown School that serves as its tasting room, a brilliantly conserved Arts and Crafts schoolhouse dating to 1915. The building alone is reason enough to visit; they just don't build great buildings like this any longer. Ann and I were not taken with the wines on the tasting flight, except for the Bordeaux blanc-style Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc blend. We put a case of it in our car to have as a light aperitif wine back home.

L'École No. 41 from Next Door at Woodward Canyon

Our tasting at L'École No. 41 complete, Ann and I took leave to go back to our room and rest up for her big birthday celebration at the chef's counter at Kinglet restaurant, the topic of the next post. Just as we were leaving, Dimitri told me that he was on the verge of setting up a private tasting at Holocene Wines on Monday and asked if we wanted to do that. We did want to and we did taste, to be covered in a couple of posts.