One of our first winery visits during our weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, for its recent Spring Release Weekend was to Brook & Bull and Vital Winery. We’d first visited a year ago and were looking forward to some great wines. The two share a tasting room; owner; and winemaker, Ashley Trout. Brook & Bull (formerly March Cellars) has been producing wine since 2014, but Ashley has been in the wine industry since 1999 and clearly knows her stuff when it comes to making wonderfully balanced, nuanced wines that are drinkable now and also can be set down for years. She was featured as one of Wine Enthusiast‘s “Top 40 Under 40” in 2018, and her energy and enthusiasm for wine and the Walla Walla community shine brightly when you speak with her.

The 2,000-case Brook & Bull sells most of its wine through the tasting room and wine club, offering Malbec and Malbec blends (Ashley spent nearly 10 years in Argentina), Cab Sauv, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot, Chardonnay and Rosé. The tasting room and wine labels feature gorgeous black-and-white photos of images from the West: sweeping cloudscapes, wind-sculpted pines, bison. I asked her about the photography, and she said she found the images and “stalked” the photographers on the internet until she got their permission to use their images.

My friends and I enjoyed a great chat with Ashley when she strolled outside to the tasting room patio and joined us around our table.

Ashley Trout, winemaker, Brook & Bull and Vital Winery

It’s one of the best things about wine tasting in Walla Walla: Most of the owners/wine makers spend time in their tasting rooms and happily chat with their guests. There’s no pretension here, and time is taken to relate to visitors on a personal level. This is true whether you’re at an up-and-coming winery or a well-established and multiple-award winning establishment.

We spoke at some length about Vital Winery, a nonprofit whose entire proceeds go to support the SOS Clinic. This free, nonprofit, quality walk-in facility provides health care to those with inadequate or no insurance, no questions asked, regardless of citizenship status. Most of the vineyard and winery workers lack health insurance because most of the jobs in the wine industry are seasonal and/or part-time. Ashley had been mulling ways to provide support to those vital individuals for years and in 2016 launched Vital. Virtually every aspect of the winemaking process is covered through donations from other wineries, cooperages, individuals and grants: bottles, barrels, fruit, wine, hauling, crushing, bottling, lab work, labeling and public relations. She spoke of how sometimes it can be a (good) challenge to juggle the abundance of unsolicited but welcome donations and how the project has more than exceeded her hopes of success.

In addition to supporting the clinic, each year Vital holds a release party and dinner for donors and harvest workers, sponsored by Whitehouse-Crawford, one of the premier restaurants in Walla Walla (and about which I’ve enthused in more than one blog). A ticket to the event purchases a place both for the donor and a worker, giving those workers a chance to literally enjoy the fruits of their labor and recognition for their work.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit with Ashley and her wines and applaud the work she does to support the winemaking community in Walla Walla.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor