Walla Walla – a great wine weekend with friends
A few months ago, I organized a trip to Walla Walla for 24 friends to do a weekend of wine tasting. While I am not necessarily a wine connoisseur, experience has made me a decent trip planner. Plus, with Beth Ann’s help – in her spare time she dreams of being a Washington State winemaker – we came up with a fantastic wine weekend experience in Walla Walla. If you are headed to Walla Walla with a group or even just two people, I would highly recommend the wineries we visited, the restaurants we went to, and even the hotels we stayed in (La Quinta and Holiday Inn Express).
You can see all of the hotel, restaurant, and winery details for Walla Walla in the document below.
Beth Ann, Anne, and I left on Friday morning around 10am and headed towards Walla Walla with the goal of stopping at a few of the great wineries enroute to Walla Walla. The drive to Walla Walla gave me a great reminder of how stunning the landscapes of Eastern Washington are. I cant remember all of the wineries we visited, but the memorable and recommended ones were L’Ecole and Woodward Canyon.
We stayed that night at the La Quinta downtown which was fine for the price (about $89 per night) and two blocks from the center of town. There were other people that stayed at the newer and much nicer Holiday Inn Express which was the same price but about a mile outside of town. After checking in, we immediately headed to dinner at the Creektown Cafe which had fantastic food and then met up with the rest of the crew at the Mill Creek Brewpub.
The following day, we got up around 8:30am and immediately started the wine trail. The first two wineries on the agenda were tasting rooms in the downtown area and were walking distance from the hotel. It was perfect for the people that wanted to start early as well as for the people that wanted to sleep in…
Stop 1 (10:15am) – Spring Valley Vinters – great wine, on the more expensive side, but there was an amazing family history on the winery and as I learned later even some family scandal
Stop 2 (11:15am) – Fort Walla Walla Cellars – not a great atmosphere for tasting, but the wine was great. Especially their Reserve Syrah (cant get it in stores) which I think nearly everyone bought.
We then had a fantastic lunch at a deli called Luscious. We had some great gourmet sandwiches and sat outside as a large group and enjoyed the nice weather. People were excited for the day to start and they got even more pumped when the limos showed up…
(this is the smaller one – the other one was a stretch suburban designed for a rockstar!)
We boarded our limos and we were off to Dunham where we were all going to to a tasting together. Dunham was good but they gave us so many wines to taste (ahhh the luxury) that it was almost overwhelming and nearly impossible to compare them against each other.
The limos then split up and we headed to the next two stops:
Stop 4: Syzygy – a cool winery with some great wines. Highly recommended.
Stop 5: Tamarack Cellars – the wine, the atmosphere of the winery, and the people working there were great. Their Firehouse Red was definitely the go-to given the value for the price. I think the average number of bottles bought there was 1.5 per person.
Stop 6: Pepperbridge – the first of the true wineries (see middle pic below). It highlighted the beauty of the area and it had a great deck that we could hang out on. We stayed there for a while despite the fact that they only had 3 wines to taste and they were not as tasty as the other places we had stopped
After that, we got back in the limos and headed to Stop 7: Saviah where the heat got turned up a little…. We were greeted by the owner and a bunch of the people that worked there with open arms and open bottles of wine. They had an 8 wine tasting menu for us and we definitely tasted all of them (maybe multiple times). Saviah was another one of those places that had great wine (I bought 4 bottles), great people (they almost let us take their ATVs out), and just a ton of laughs. Highly recommended.
Stop 8 was the final stop on the tour and actually the reason why I planned the Walla Walla trip in the first place: Gramercy Cellars which is owned by my friends – Greg and Pam Harrington – and which shares their building with Waters winery. Pulling into the winery, you could hear the oohs and aahs. The winery is just spectacularly designed (same designer as Januik in Woodinville) and totally unique but at the same time the type of place that you could be content spending all day at.
Plus, Greg hooked us up with a variety of his insanely good wine and even gave us our first tour of the day including tasting the fresh grape juice directly from the buckets of the collected wine grapes (see picture below).
After a great time there, we headed to Greg’s friend’s house for a end of day bbq, a fantastic sunset, a tour of a vineyard, and some campfire singing. Beth Ann even got to meet and talk shop with the owner and winemaker of Leonetti. What a ridiculously fun time. If you are headed to Walla Walla for wine tasting, definitely make sure that you hit up the same places!
Wow, that looks amazing. My wife and I have been meaning to get over there for years now and haven\’t made it yet. But you\’ve added more fuel to the fire for us to make the trip!