Gwendolyn Elliott

The first weekend in May, the last installment of my three-part look at the history and impact of the Walla Walla Community College’s Enology and Viticulture program was published in the U-B. In this chapter, I turned to a few graduates of the program for their thoughts about their time at the college, its role in Washington state wine, and how it influenced their careers.

You can read Part III here, Part II here, and Part I here. For PDFs of the series, click the following links to download:

• Part 1: Myles Ahead: 25 years of Enology and Viticulture at WWCC
• Part II: The Rootstock: How WWCC’s Center for Enology and Viticulture Came To Be
• Part III: Lift Off: The Graduates Pushing Washington Wine to New Heights

While that settles the news on the WWCC series, a big story in Walla Walla (and here at Casa Woodruff) is the imminent closure of Canvasback, the Napa-based Duckhorn-owned Southside winery that Toby manages. The tasting room will close May 31st as part of a wider consolidation within the company representatives say will allow them to allocate resources to higher performing properties.

I’ll be writing more about this, and its significance here in Walla Walla, for another outlet in the near future.

What this means for me and Toby personally, we’re not sure yet, but it’s given us a lot to chew on.

Somewhere recently among all the news of the new pope, I came across a quote attributed to the recently departed Pope Francis. “Wine expresses the abundance of the banquet and the joy of the feast.”

It’s a rich contemplation for uncertain times, but in his more famous quote, Robert Mondavi says similarly: that wine is a “source of pleasure and diversion” that has accompanied pretty much every occasion in life throughout human history. In other words: Bottoms up! In good times and bad, we toast to abundance and joy with the spiritual drink of the popes, and we drink in hope of more to come. (We’ve tried, but White Claw just doesn’t cut it.)

Meanwhile, my next “Wine Is a Food Group” column is underway, along with more wine writing for Visit Walla Walla.

As always, I’ll keep you posted here, if you don’t see my byline out in the wild first. Until then, enjoy yourself!