Walla Walla bing bang
Will success spoil southeastern Washington? Tourism and a desirable lifestyle now define the Northwest's hottest wine ghetto.
Much has already been written about the Walla Walla miracle, how an old, insular small town in the farm country of southeastern Washington emerged as a major wine center with all the accoutrements that go with it: tourism, fine food, and lots of newcomers looking for all-American livability.
Call it the new Willamette Valley, the new Napa, or simply the new Walla Walla – for anyone who remembers the old city, it's an amazing transformation to behold. This town used to be primarily known to the rest of us as a place of sweet onions and bad hangings at the State Penitentiary.
No more. Hanging is an option, not a mandate in Washington these days. And rather poignantly, during the last legislative session, Olympia lawmakers officially voted the Walla Walla Sweet Onion as official state vegetable – a title I thought was already held by the office of lieutenant governor.
It took years for the onion lobby to get the bill passed, but like most legislation, it comes too late: Walla Walla has moved on.
The city and environs are now defined by the grape. Vineyards and wineries are everywhere. Wandering through downtown recently, I was struck by the boomtown atmosphere: There are wine tasting rooms, wine cellars, wine bars, wine merchants, restaurants with wine menus – by appearances everything but winos.
Walla Walla is a wine ghetto. Even local mini-marts offer great wine selection. Want a case discount with your Big Gulp? The winemakers are organized. The head of Walla Walla's tourism office – yes, they have one – is a smart New Yorker named Michael Davidson who seems to know what he's doing. For instance, in a recent interview he immediately deflected any comparison to the Napa Valley. "We're not going to be the next Napa and we don't want to be the next Napa," he says. "Walla Walla is unique."
That says a lot. For one thing, it says that Walla Walla is ambitious on its own behalf – this is no copy-cat phenom but an original. They've got more charm than the Yakima Valley, more intimacy than Woodinville. It also says Walla Walla doesn't plan to be generic or to sell its soul for a tourism buck. No lederhosen like Leavenworth.
Success or failure will be based on the quality of the wine and the fact that in Walla Walla, the people pouring your juice are the same people who made it. It's intimate, and success or failure will depend on the quality of the wine and whether it continues to merit serious attention and generate genuine excitement.
Tourism is fragile, says Davidson. In other words, you have to pay attention, stay real, and not bet everything on a fad or a fantasy. Walla Walla doesn't need to be the Disneyland of food and wine. If things change, it can always fall back on, well, onions, or the penitentiary, or the lavender business, or the fact that it has a great school (Whitman College), or its history – after all, this is a region where the landscape has been shaped by Europeans for two centuries. Though I must say that hanging your heritage tourism hat on the Whitman massacre is a bit tired and grim. The National Park Service historic site feels like a cemetery, which it is. The other standby legacy, the Lewis and Clark expedition, is so, well, 2004.
And there's also the town's appeal as a place to live: affordable, good looking, cultured (in addition to restaurants, the wine boom is bringing art galleries, there's a farmer's market, and plans for a chamber music festival). Beyond tourism, Walla Walla is drawing more permanent residents – refugees from Pugetopolis and Portland. That, as we mossbacks know, is a double-edged sword. What goes with a good Merlot? Try traffic jams and a slice of density.
The debate over that has already begun. Check out the comment thread following an article in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin: "Walla Walla is a real community not a make-believe tourist trap." But the impact of tourism is being felt: If you like studies, one says tourism contributes more than $70 million to the local economy.
And what of Walla Walla's neighbors? How do they feel about its success? Davidson tells me that a newspaper editorial in the Tri-City Herald wondered why they were simply a "pit stop" for folks on their way from Yakima to Walla Walla, an embarrassing admission for a bigger urban area always on the make and with wineries of its own.
For some of Walla Walla's smaller neighbors, however, there is some trickle down. Head east from Walla Walla toward Lewiston, Idaho, and you'll pass through charming little Waitsburg – a place with a Mark Twain-era name and feel that is sprouting good restaurants and has a downtown with a lot of potential for food tourists. Seattle wine writer Paul Gregutt lives there part time and recently wrote a blurb about his favorite place for a Budget Travel magazine feature on America's "10 coolest small towns."
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 9:20 a.m. inappropriate
Walt Whitman at WW: Let's hope William Orville Douglas - inspirer of the Wild and Scenic Rivers act, and graduate of Whitman (law school was at Columbia) - would be proud.
-D.
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 10:02 a.m. inappropriate
Over the course of several years, Walla Walla served for me as the place where I made a right turn onto what eventually becomes Oregon Highway 12 stopping 10-miles south at Athena, OR, home one July weekend per year to the quaint Athena Caledonian Games. A funkier Celtic fesitval you'll never find, but no rival to Enumclaw's PNW Highland Games (in fact, it's not even sanctioned by B.C. Pipers, the governing body for piping and drumming competitions), it has a down home feel that's unique.
Drawing competitors and performers mostly from the Inland Empire (the Boise Highlanders always made an appearance), pipe band exhibitions, solo piping contests, highland dancing, and Scottish athletics in the midst of endless amber waves of grain brought a wee bit o' the highlands to the old west. That the Games' opening day parade featured more cowboys and rodeo queens on horseback than bandsmen in kilts reminded everyone of Athena's reality on all but that particular weekend.
Since the Athena Games always seem to coincide with Walla Walla's harvest and accompanying onion festival meant my bangers and neeps were smothered in grilled onions. To date, no vintage has surfaced as an appropriate accompaniment to such a meal, Guinness notwithstanding.
Accommodations in Athena were a two-person tent pitched in the shadow of the local multi-community elementary school. Trusting souls that they are, officials of the Athena-Weston School District left a light on for us and the doors unlocked so we could avail ourselves of showers and other sanitary facilities.
Given the propensity of Scots generally and pipers specifically to do what they are wont to do upon the completion of the day's competitive events and accompanying festivities, the school officials' trust was akin to putting the educational future of local youngsters on a sharp roll of the dice.
Keeping that in mind, we were untidy, but never ungrateful. The school still stands.
The local community, small though it is, fielded a pipe "band" of its own. Primarily youngsters of, uhm, shall we say "limited" experience, it always both did its best and the local community proud. I mean, how many tiny, wheat-farming towns can lay claim to having a pipe band of its very own?
To a middle-aged, one-step-up-from-beginning, Grade 4 (barely) piper, Athena was where I could realistically hope to place among competition medalists. While I would continue to be beaten by 11-year olds, a second place award in 2/4 march was better than a poke under the kilt.
It's been a few years, though, since my last visit. I parted company from the band with which I played, and life moved on. But the Athena Caledonian Games continues, and, from all accounts, as charming and fun as ever. So, if you're inspired by Mossback's intra-state Rick Steves thing to visit Walla Walla, perhaps choosing a weekend in mid-July with a swing just south of town will make the trip special.
That is, after you've visited cousin Earl at the pen.
The Piper
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 10:09 a.m. inappropriate
Known as the most prolific fiction writer to ever author SCOTUS opinions, Douglas was Mr. "I Make This Stuff Up as I Go Along."
Besides, he was from Yakima, not Walla Walla, and as soon as he could, he beat feet for the east. He was a professor at Yale Law School when FDR tapped him to sit on the initial SEC and then SCOTUS replacing, I believe, Louis Brandeis. Would that Brandeis had survived a few more years!
It was only in his latter years did Douglas return to Washington State and then with an increasingly younger succession of wives. His wilderness home at Goose Prarie was an apt choice given his "Wanna Walnetto?" lifestyle.
Anybody but William O. Douglas!
The Piper
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 10:21 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Walt Whitman at WW: Well, I have to admit, I'm making it up as I go along too.
I spent the weekend near Goose Prairie and am developing an affection for the area - just now starting to read on W.O.
After Douglas' father died the family moved from near the Goldendale area to Yakima where he was raised in poverty. He graduated from Whitman in English and taught for a short time, before going to Law School at Columbia.
His work on corporate corruption and on wilderness protection deserves respect. There is certainly a lot written about him, anything you'd recommend?
BTW - what's a Walnetto?
-Doug
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 11:21 a.m. inappropriate
Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, the break-the-mold comeday show on CBS starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin that aired in the late 60's (the episode featuring the Smothers Brothers was as quintessentially 60's TV in an anti-establishment sense as you'll ever find) featured a running gag featuring Arte Johnson as Tyronne Horneigh and Ruth Buzzi as a hair-netted spinster.
Typically, the derby-hatted, overcoat clad Horneigh would waddle stooped over to where Buzzi sat on a park bench with her purse serving as an impromptu chastity belt.
Horneigh's introduction was generally, "Wanna Walnetto?" followed by a scurvy, best-left-for-an-obscene-phone call laugh. Buzzi would respond by flailing him with her purse until he was bludgeoned close unto death. Douglas' increasingly younger series of wives (his last, Cathy, was young enough to be his granddaughter) remind me of Tyronne Horneigh, especially since they were contemporaries and, aside from Horneigh's bushy moustache, look-alikes.
Walnetto's were a walnut-candy that has long since disappeared from your five and dime.
As far as what to read in re W. O. Douglas? Try the dissents in cases where he authored an opinion, particularly those written by Associate Justice Hugo Black. Douglas authored an opinion once contending that rocks and trees ought to have standing to sue in federal courts. Another where he questioned whether parents had a constitutional right to raise their children in the faith to which the parents subscribed.
A good case with which to start is Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), where Douglas "found" in the constitution a series of "penumbras emenating" from varions provisions of the Bill of Rights from which he made up all sorts of things. Now, the end result was probably a socially desirable thing, but that was something for a legislature to determine, not Bill Douglas.
I heard him speak once. Aside from a funny joke about cannibalism, he scared the crap out me!
The Piper
Posted Thu, Oct 18, 2:39 p.m. inappropriate
Sharing Walnettos with Goldy Hawn: We were allowed to watch Laugh-In - though probably not from the start. I do recall the skits you mentioned.
Truly a seminal show - probably inspiring Saturday Night Live - the early years of which would be more indicative of my era.
As Lily Tomlin would say, One Ringie Dingie, Two Ringie Dingie!
-D
Posted Sun, Oct 21, 12:41 p.m. inappropriate
You bet your sweet bippy. Very interesting, but stupid. Sock it to me.
-- a former TV writer
Posted Sun, Oct 21, 2:17 p.m. inappropriate
Speaking of Burbank...pretty soon there won't be anything in "beautiful downtown Burbank," about which to make jokes given NBC's decision to sell its Burbank studios and associated real estate. Where will NBC move? Given its ratings, Kazakhstan is looking real promising.
The Piper