The University of Idaho Argonaut

A new addition to the Palouse wine scene, Wawawai Canyon Winery offers a spring release influenced strongest by the land where the grapes are grown.

Editor’s note: This story is the first in a series that will continue throughout the summer focusing on wine and winemaking in the Palouse region.

The tasting room opens at 1. The glass door is propped open to let in the sun. The breeze carries in the smell of plants from the nursery next door. Crusty baguettes sit on the counter behind the tasting bar, waiting to be cut, along with a hunk of cheese with a purple rind. A massive vase full of lilacs stands at the end of the bar, five bottles of wine beside it.

The five bottles make up Wawawai Canyon Winery’s spring 2007 release, its second since the doors of the tasting room opened last fall. The fall release sold out in just a few months. The tasting room, a remodeled dairy barn complete with slightly sloped floors alongside the road from Pullman to Moscow had to be closed for the winter.

As a couple walks into the room one Friday afternoon, Christine Havens calls out a greeting, and asks if they’d like to try some wine. Havens is one of the winemakers at Wawawai Canyon.
The couple decides to try all five wines in the spring release, and as Havens pours a splash of Pinot Noir, she tells them about the wine they’ll be sipping.

“This was done in a sur lies style,” she says, introducing the term before explaining why she and her partner chose to stir the barrels of this particular vintage before bottling, adding sediment to the wine, which Havens says some people assume is a flaw. But because this is a warm-climate pinot and would not cellar well, the added sediment creates a barrier of natural chemicals to keep the wine from aging too fast. As Havens and her partner, Ben Moffet, explain all this, the couple sips and nods, before moving on to the next selection, a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon.
“We actually don’t like pinot on the market,” Havens confesses. But when the opportunity to work with a warm-climate pinot came along, they took it. “We decided to see what we could do with it.”

A philosophy of wine

Moffet and his parents, silent partners in the enterprise, planted their first grapes in Wawawai Canyon 18 years ago. The 6.5-acre vineyard is located on an area of steep, low-fertility rangeland, Havens says, which has a direct effect on the character of their wines. The climate of the area, with its higher highs and lower lows, is also unusual for a Washington vineyard.

“Wine is agriculturally based,” Havens says. “So what we do is very closely tied to the vineyard.” Unlike some wineries, the product put out by Wawawai Canyon can vary drastically from harvest to harvest. In 2005, for example, grasshoppers ate most of their crop. But Havens and Moffet were able to purchase fruit from Washington’s Wahluke Slope, and 2005 wines make up much of their spring release, though their taste is dramatically different from wine made from grapes grown in the canyon.

In recent years, Moffet says, wine has become a commodity, like milk or beef. Like these products, wines have become more bland and predictable as winemakers put all their efforts toward making a consistent product, he says. But Moffet seeks to create wine that is unique — a wine that speaks first of all to the provenance and character of its grapes.

The winemaker, Moffet and Havens say, has less to do with the final product than the grape itself. Too often, they say, winemakers try to force a flavor out of their grapes that isn’t inherently there. Chemicals to simulate natural tannins can be added, but Havens and Moffet have chosen to work the grapes simply and naturally, using traditional methods of processing.

For some harvests, Moffet chooses “whole-cluster fermentation” — a process where the grapes are not separated from the stems and leaves before crushing. This produces a more full-bodied wine, he says.

“We actually stomp some vintages,” Havens says, though the process can be cold and painful. Whatever the method Havens and Moffet choose to turn the grapes to wine, they are directed by the harvest.

“The characteristics of the fruit are set at the time you harvest it,” Havens says, adding that roughly 80 percent of the taste of the wine has to do with the quality of the grapes.

“The important thing to recognize,” Moffet says, “is that your goal at a winery is to make the fruit shine. I’m guided by the fruit that’s brought in.”

“A lot of winemakers hurry to make wines that are market-ready,” Havens says, due to the perception that the general public won’t cellar a wine for any length of time. Though there are chemicals that force the grape and the wine toward market-readiness, to the experienced taster these wines often feel constructed or out of balance.

“Because we’re not large-production driven,” Havens says, “we do allow our wines to age for a long time before releasing them to the public.” Because making wine isn’t the only thing they do — they also own and operate a consulting firm — Havens and Moffet say they can focus on handcrafting small amounts of wine.

“We make as much wine as we can comfortably make,” Moffet says. And though they would like to eventually produce more wine, Havens agrees.
“I think we’ll always be a boutique winery,” she says — the goal of Wawawai Canyon Winery will never be to fully sustain a living for Havens and Moffet.
“Our vision for the business is that we really like making wine,” Moffet says. “It’s very artistic.”

A drive for creativity

Each Wawawai Canyon bottle of wine is complete with label designed by Havens. Her background in fine art, she says, has enabled her to create a brand identity for the winery, cards and a Web site.

A major aspect of the consulting firm Havens and Moffet run is establishing a brand image for other local wineries, such as Pullman’s Merry Cellars. Currently, according to Havens, they work exclusively with wine-related businesses.

Moffet’s specialty in the business is vineyard establishment. He helps new vineyard owners to choose a site, varieties of grapes, irrigation methods and a way of trellising — “how to basically put your vineyard together,” Havens says. Moffet also focuses on the specifics of winemaking and methods of fermentation.

Most of the consulting firm’s clients are local, though they have worked with clients as far away as Mattawa. When clients come to Havens and Moffet, they are excited to take their winery in a new direction, which Havens says makes the job a lot of fun. Though their own winery’s vision and mission are well defined, working with clients helps keep Havens and Moffet inventive.
“I think if anything,” Havens says, “it keeps us creatively vital. (Moffet and I) would be hard-pressed to keep a desk job.”

A cultural opportunity

On a Thursday night some weeks ago, more than 100 people packed into the converted dairy barn for an art opening — paintings from local artist Jeanne Fulfs lined the walls of the open room until recently. Art openings are a way to make the Pullman area, which Moffet and Havens consider something of a cultural wasteland, more interesting.

“There’s a lack of things for adults to do in the area,” Moffet says. Havens, who watched the growth of Walla Walla into a destination for wine connoisseurs, hopes that events at their tasting room will spur similar development in Pullman.

“Every six weeks or so we’d like to have a show,” she says. Moffet and Havens are planning to install aging barrels and a commercial kitchen at the tasting room, which would allow them to host barrel tastings during the winter and the occasional winemakers’ dinner throughout the year.

“We’re excited about integrating the kind of experience that connects to the region,” Moffet says. Wine should be firmly connected to the region it comes from, he says, and Wawawai Canyon Winery will always try to do that.

“We’ve been learning and I feel like we’ve been very successful,” he says. “To some extent, we’ve been very lucky.”