Gwendolyn Elliott

>>>>> Featured image: From left, Dr. Myles Anderson, founding director of the Walla Walla Community College’s Institute for Enology and Viticulture, with wife, Myrna, and Martin Fujishin, current director, in the tasting room at College Cellars in January. Bottles of student wine for sale and tasting, made from grapes in the teaching vineyards, are on the wall behind them. <<<<<

2025 rings in a quarter of a century of wine and vine education at the Walla Walla Community College (WWCC). In the first of a three-part series for “Wine Is a Food Group,” I report on the history of enology and viticulture training at WWCC, its impact in Walla Walla, and its wider effect on Washington state wine. You can read the first installment here.

It’s been a while since I stumped for subscriptions. While I’d love more subscribers to my free blog, what I really want to encourage is your subscription to the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (you can do that here), or any local, independent source where you find your news. The U-B pays me a small sum for my column, so while I can, I’d like to use what little influence I have here to impart a few good reasons to donate to news organizations.

Your subscription would support me in another indirect way, as I read the U-B everyday. Without it, I—and everyone in Walla Walla—would have no source of local news. Without a source of local news, I shudder to think of the civic dialogue with just Facebook, Next Door, Tidbits, and Walla Walla scanner info by Kevin (which I actually think could be the beginning of a wonderful community blog, similar to the West Seattle Blog, if a reporter along the lines of the WSB’s Tracy Record had such a notion) leading the conversation.

Without the U-B, I can only imagine what stories would go unreported—most of them, I would guess.

I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, as an article was published in the U-B recently that sent shockwaves through the wine community. Everywhere I went, people were talking about it. I, for one, was grateful to read it—a vetted news report—as opposed to murmurings on social media, or the types of rumors that easily spread in small communities. It was important information the community deserved to know.

It’s no secret newspapers are, have long been, struggling. A big part of this is because social media masquerades as “news” when it’s really just an unregulated endless scroll of open-sourced “content” that’s either advertising or someone’s highly-charged opinion that paid for the privilege to be placed before your peeping eyes.

Newspapers aren’t perfect, but to mine for accuracy and clarity, and to deliver the facts takes time, training, and rigor. Unlike Zuckerberg, news reporters and community journos are not making billions from exploiting your attention with endlessly updated algorithms. Most (like me, when I worked at one) make just enough to get by (in full transparency, that was, and sadly still is, about 30 to 50K a year). If you’d like a little exercise in fact-checking, just scan your local job listings for reporters and note the salary range.

Support your local paper while you have one. Call them with your story ideas. Alert them if you have a news tip. Set up a recurring monthly subscription. Leverage them to do the storytelling and reporting so that you don’t feel like you have to—in all cases, newspapers will do it better.

If there’s anything the age of social media has led people to believe, it’s that their personal platforms have the power to enlighten and inform, when most of the time, they are just tools of personal propaganda, highly curated feeds of the lives we would like others to believe we have. What would our feeds look like if they all had to go through an independent fact-checker, or rounds of drafts from a skeptical, eyebrow-raised editor?

#Endrant. Please support the U-B if you can. Here’s how. NWPB is also another great outlet worth your support. The have a great new newsletter that often covers Walla Walla. Here’s how you can donate or subscribe.

That’s about it for now! I’m in Boise this weekend with Pursued by Bear for Walla Walla on Tour and have been having a great time talking about Washington wine with a group of delightful out-of-state sippers.

More stories are in the pipeline, and I’ll ping you here as they go live, including the rest of the WWCC series. Thanks for reading along.

I leave you with a gallery of photos of Jacques Bordeaux, possibly the friendliest Bulldog I’ve ever met (these dogs can be standoffish and disinterested). I couldn’t take my eyes off his squishable rolls and jostling jowls, and his resting grump face that spontaneously erupted into uncontrollable snarfs at the slightest inkling of human attention. He’s the tasting room ambassador at Smoky Rose Cellars, and was a friend to all who entered.