This weekend we are enjoying our annual trek to Walla Walla, Wash., for spring release weekend, when the 100-plus local wineries present their newest vintages. This region, in the far southeast corner of the state, produces highly rated wines of great complexity and depth. Long a wheat-producing area (as well as those sweet Walla Walla onions), now alternating fields of brown fallow and bright green winter wheat mingle with vineyards, just now beginning to leaf out their neatly pruned vines.

We arrived Thursday afternoon so we could get a jump on the weekend crowds. Yesterday we started just after 10 a.m., visiting a few of our stand-by favorites and hoping to get recommendations for some new wineries. Our visit to Saviah in the South End provided us with some nice tastes and excellent suggestions for places to add to our list. A short jaunt took us to Solemn, producing just since 2014 but already garnering praise and awards. Owner/winemaker Justin Basel grew up in the business (Basel Cellars) and now creates wines from his family’s estate vineyards. We loved everything we tasted, as well as the warm welcome we received from Justin and winery dog, Duck, prompting Harry to immediately join the wine club. We’re looking forward to future visits to the new tasting room being built and plans for pop-up dinners in the vineyard created by Justin’s many chef friends.

Finding our first Saviah recommendation completely legit, we moved on to Brook & Bull Cellars (if you’re a fisherman, you’ll get the connection to winemaker Ashley Trout’s name). We’d been told its rosé was the best in the valley but learned they were nearly sold out and weren’t pouring it. Still confident in our source, we went ahead and bought two bottles (at only $19 each, a good deal), taste unsipped, and enjoyed sampling a few other bottlings as well.

After visiting a few of our old favorites (Rulo offers great, reasonably priced wines as well as a host of fabulous cheeses on these weekends, and we appreciate the Isenhower family’s lovely wines and warm hospitality) we made our last stop of the day. We were enticed to visit Canoe Ridge Vineyard with the promise of a barrel tasting — always a treat. This was a first visit for us, although the winery has operated since 1994 in a beautiful old brick building now on the National Register of Historic Places.   Serving as the town’s streetcar and train facility in the early 1900s, it now comfortably houses towering stacks of barrels. Here, with the enormous doors flung open to the bright spring day,  we enjoyed tastes from barrels of Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon with winemaker Haydn Mouat, a South Island New Zealander who’s been making wine in the States for some 20 years.

It proved to be a perfect day in Walla Walla: great wines, congenial tasting room staff, approachable winemakers, affable fellow oenophiles in a beautiful setting.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor