Gwendolyn Elliott

Why does wine matter? Why is it important? Why should anyone care?

In my recent “Wine Is a Food Group” column, I explore the idea. Here’s a link to the column, and to a PDF you can download.

I train the angle through a mini profile of Jonathan Edelman, co-owner and winemaker at the recently-opened tasting room for Foolhardy Vintners, the brand he shares with fellow owner and winemaker, Dan Sogg.

As I learned why wine is important to Edelman, I thought about why it’s important to me, and to Walla Walla.

In a world where human attention spans have never been shorter, and where efficiency, convenience, consumerism, and automation dictate the algorithms forcefully inserted into our now-almost entirely digital lives, wine can facilitate a different understanding about what makes life truly enjoyable, satisfying, even worth living. 

At least to me, wine remains an invitation—to slow down, to remember, to think. To contemplate, to wonder, to discuss. To commune, to celebrate. To feel, to become aware—of the senses, of time and place, of others. As I’ve said before, to connect. Wine can be a portal through which you can become lost—in the moment—and it’s precisely moments like these that add richness, authenticity, and meaning to life.

It’s exhilarating to meet anyone who feels genuinely excited about anything, much less wine these days. And it’s spirit-lifting to encounter a team that has tuned out the cynicism and all of wine’s current “headwinds” to start a winery because it is that fulfilling.

As we increasingly hand over the blueprints of human ingenuity to AI, I celebrate this entirely human, and hopeful, impulse. Meanwhile, the addition of a new tasting room in Walla Walla, where our wine-based economy has become uncertain, is an investment in community and a vote of confidence in the quality of Washington wine.

You can bet I’ll drink to that.