A few weekends ago we spent time in one of our favorite wine regions: the Walla Walla Valley in southeast Washington state. Walla Walla (“the town so nice they named it twice”) is a charming community which grew up in the heart of wheat country in the 19^th century and is home to a couple of small private colleges — and the state’s penitentiary. The downtown core boasts a number of well-preserved historic buildings which house galleries, restaurants, boutiques and, of course, tasting rooms for some of the nearly 150 wineries which call the valley home.

We visited on Spring Release weekend, when many wineries host events for the general public and their wine club members as they present their most recent vintages. We stopped in at some of our favorite places and made the acquaintance of a few new ones which we plan to revisit on future trips to the region. What made this trip even more pleasurable is that we shared it with long-time friends who share our passion for excellent wine and food.

We began Friday afternoon at Isenhower Cellars, where, along with a delicious assortment of tapas-style dishes, Brett and Denise Isenhower introduced the second in a series of red wine blends adorned with their young daughters’  label art, along with their other new vintages. We like supporting this family-owned and -operated winery and really like their highly rated wines. We moved on to new-to-us Corliss Estates in its stunning, art-filled tasting room housed in a beautifully restored and reconfigured brick edifice that once housed a bakery.

The next morning found us at another old favorite, Rulo Winery. The winery’s tasting room is in a large, industrial warehouse which also serves as its fermentation and barrel room — opposite end of the spectrum from Corliss’s amazing space the evening before. However, the wines Rulo produces clearly do not suffer from a less-than-opulent production facility, and we were reminded again why we love them so much as we tasted several of the new releases and a few older favorites along with a host of fantastic foreign and domestic cheeses.

A midday stop for lunch at another tried-and-true haunt, Olive Marketplace and Café in the heart of downtown, provided us with the necessary sustenance and break from wine-imbibing before we visited a few additional places in the afternoon. We capped off the day at Leonetti Cellars, founded by the Figgins family about 30 years ago here, a highly respected and award-winning winery making hearty, luscious reds. The winery is rarely open to the public, so we enjoyed strolling the lovely grounds and buildings while sipping wine and sampling bite-sized corn fritters and thin-sliced marinated strip steak.

All in all, it was a relaxing, pleasant spring weekend spent with good friends. Not a bad way to start the season!

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor