While the reputation of Washington wine is largely ‘like California but with less fruit, alcohol, body and oak’, Walla Walla’s top output has always more closely resembled cult Napa Cab or Barossa Shiraz, albeit with less eye-popping prices. This should come as no surprise given the region’s desert-like aridity (offset by river-fed irrigation: Walla Walla means ‘many waters’) and 300 annual days of sunshine, which have made it an agricultural wonderland since the mid-1800s arrival of European settlers, many of French Canadian and Italian origin.

The best wines, however, have always retained a strong sense of place beyond mere ripeness, with savoury nuances and robust, tightly constructed frames variously reflecting sites planted on slopes of free-draining basalt or loess left by ancient volcanoes, the prehistoric Missoula floods and violent winds; or else alluvial fans strewn with Châteauneuf-like cobblestones, found in the southern district known, evocatively, as The Rocks. Sensitive blending, mainly of Bordeaux grapes, has always yielded wines more multifaceted than is easily achievable with varietals.

The mid-2000s arrival of new-wave wineries like Gramercy and Rôtie Cellars, using later-ripening Rhône varieties to craft wines tailor-made for the 2010s’ In Pursuit of Balance movement, offered an alternative vision of Walla Walla: restrained, sleek, delicate even. They pushed the terroir conversation further, although they weren’t the first to raise it. (Named vineyards like Seven Hills and Cayuse’s Cailloux vineyard date from the 1980s and 90s). The wines were also (comparatively) more approachably priced, sitting around US$40 when many wineries’ flagships were over $60 and Leonetti’s and Cayuse’s were well over $100.

Today, prices are universally higher but remain affordable compared to those from further south. Christophe Baron laments, ‘We’re not Harlan, we’re not Screaming Eagle. We deserve to have that recognition, but it’s not there yet.’ In fact, Wine Bible author and Napa resident Karen MacNeil has (favourably) likened Walla Walla to Napa 40 years ago. Overall quality is noticeably higher than when I first visited in 2011, whether because of the newcomers’ influence or a shift in market preferences, winemaking seems less overt, with more careful articulation of fruit and sites. Chris Figgins of Leonetti, who took over winemaking in 2001 from his father, founder Gary Figgins, says the approachable style of the 1980s and 90s was often achieved with 100% new oak, some American, while he uses less new oak and mainly French, with some larger ovals, as well as barriques and puncheons. These offer a blend of power with levity – a combination he calls his holy grail. He says their switch away from purchased fruit towards estate-grown grapes in the 90s brought a new focus on terroir.

If the wines have remained under the radar, it is partly because they simply don’t reach that many wine lists or store shelves, either domestically or internationally. The local market is strong, and wine-club sales have always been the secret sauce here: from 2022 to 2023, they jumped 5.5% (11% in value), while Napa, Sonoma and Oregon saw drops of 4.7%, 9.6% and 9.2% respectively. Mailing lists are the lifeblood of boutique wineries such as Rasa Vineyards, owned by Billo Naravane MW and brother Pinto, and especially cult-wine aspirants like Dossier, which Billo makes for real-estate developer Tim Lenihan and former NFL player Sidney Rice with general manager Brandon Kubrock. The joke in town about Leonetti’s notoriously long waiting list is that Michael Jordan once allegedly called to ask how long the wait was and was told five years; upon revealing his identity, he was told five years. Leonetti’s enviable position dates back to its very first vintage (1978), which gained national acclaim, after which Chris Figgins says, ‘the phone wouldn’t stop ringing’.

However, many feel the region’s lack of a singular focus has hampered its ascent. Willamette has Pinot, and Napa has Cabernet, while Walla Walla has shuttled between Bordeaux and Rhône blends – ranging in style from K Vintner’s bombastic K Syrah, to Gramercy’s dainty John Lewis – with smatterings of other reds such as Sangiovese and Tempranillo. Furthermore, many Walla Walla wineries vinify grapes from elsewhere in Washington, especially whites; both Dossier and Rasa are made in Walla Walla, but the grapes mostly grow elsewhere. Today, Cabernet is largely winning; more than 25% of the state’s grape harvest is Cabernet Sauvignon, which Naravane admits is easier to sell than his beloved Syrah, especially at lofty price points.

Still, Baron’s Bionic Wines portfolio, which includes Cayuse and the newer, ultra-exclusive Hors Catégorie, No Girls and Horsepower, remains staunchly Syrah-focused. Leonetti, renowned for its Cab but proud of the family’s Italian immigrant roots, is elevating Italian varieties such as Aglianico. Italian wine lover Chris Figgins’s taciturn, saline version would make any Campanian proud; at around $150, it is easily among the world’s priciest Aglianicos.

As Napa gradually becomes a Cabernet monoculture, Walla Walla’s eclecticism comes to seem like a decent climate-change strategy. Keenly attuned producers are now quietly blending in more late-ripening grapes like Petit Verdot and moving into the foothills of the local Blue Mountains. Rain here is more plentiful and temperatures moderated, and the steep slopes lessen the risk of frost (Hors Catégorie’s gradients go up to 60° ); the wines have an angular acidity uncommon in the flatlands. Chris Figgins’s own Figgins Estates, built around a rare plot he discovered for sale while going fishing in a popular dryland wheat-farming area, is currently planted up to approximately 500m (1,640ft) above sea level but includes fields he calls his ‘100-year hedge’ rising to almost 800m (2,625ft).

Deeply encouraging to me is the new-found comfort among top producers with their levels of ambition. Dossier, launching this year with its $200+ Halo tier (a video-game reference courtesy of Kubrock), is priced to make a statement. The prospective owners pitched it to Naravane as a label he could make ‘without constraints’, in terms of fruit, custom oak and anything else. Bionic Wines, an entity that coalesced during the pandemic, now occupies four immense structures (‘studios’), with the ground broken for a fifth that will contain the library, for which around 6,000 cases have been amassed over the years, including magnums and Jéroboams. Figgins’s new winery, started in 2021, has a subterranean cellar freshly bored into the basalt that will likewise house a library. (Luckily, Leonetti’s early critical success prompted the family to keep a ‘healthy library’ there, too, Figgins says.) He hopes it will allow people to taste wines at 15–20 years, or even 30, saying that expecting collectors to hold them that long is currently a pipe dream. In an industry that, for years, has traded on offering better value than X or Y, this confidence is refreshing, and the wines – at least those sampled on my visit – taste nothing like hubris.