Recently, the geologist Kevin Pogue asked Walla Walla winemaker Doug Frost if he could think of a red wine from any place on the planet that one would know exactly where it came from without even tasting it. It was sort of a trick question: Pogue is the Pacific Northwest’s premier specialist in geography and soil terroir, who writes most of the region’s applications for new AVAs. And he was asking this question of Frost, one of only three people alive who’s both a Master Sommelier and Master of Wine. Frost was wary. “There are always outliers,” he said. “Always wines that go against type.” Except for those from one region, shot back Pogue: The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater, the Oregon appellation on the southern end of the Walla Walla Valley. 

The Rocks’ soils are composed almost entirely of cobblestones, some as big as your fist, some as big as your head. Frost couldn’t argue with that: aromatically speaking, Rocks wines are remarkably consistent, even if you try to work against their tendencies, as he had in past vintages. “The Rocks don’t care about your intentions,” Frost admitted to Pogue. “They are what they are.”

Just put a glass of Rocks Syrah under your nose and decide for yourself. Rocks Syrahs have an aromatic signature at once exotic and hauntingly savory: fig, plum, blackberry, woodsmoke, smoldering peat, pork fat, bacon, olive, tapenade, lavender, white pepper, hoisin, crude oil, scotch, tar, leather, latex, drying blood—I could go on, and I often do. At a recent presentation I remarked that the sauvage bits, what most refer to as the Rocks “funk”, wouldn’t be out of place in a sadist’s pantry. In fact aromatically these might be the wildest, most out there wines in the world for Rhône varieties—way more than the Rhône Valley, Barossa and the McLaren Vale, the Gimblett Gravels in New Zealand, Swartland, and, really, anywhere else. 

Enthusiasm for these Walla Walla wines, and their seductive aromatic signature, has often overshadowed a disconnect between nose and palate that’s troubled me and other observers for years: As distinctive as the aromatics are, the palate rarely delivered. It often seemed like a letdown, with corpulent flavors, slack textures, and far more flesh than muscle tone. Lavish oak and occasional residual sugar added to this feeling of heaviness, and the wines’ ageability often seemed questionable. 

But as we near three decades of Rocks vintages, winemakers have started to bridge that gap between nose and palate. A new cohort of producers—Peter Devison of Devison Vintners, Todd and Carrie Alexander of Force Majeure et al., the Robertson family at SJR and Delmas, Brian Marcy at Big Table Farm, Doug Frost and Brian Rudin at Echolands, Greg Harrington and Brandon Moss at Gramercy Cellars, and Jesus Bujanda and Devyani Gupta of the Rioja import Valdemar Estates, and others—are actively going against type. 

Perhaps inspired by the wine world’s pursuit of balance, they’re making wines that are focused, precise, and restrained, while still being inimitably Rocks. “The last seven or eight years have seen a massive shift in both farming and winemaking practices,” says Delmas winery owner and Rocks AVA point-person Steve Robertson. “New development, cultural terroir, and a collective spirit have us all moving in the right direction.”

Not quite 30 years ago, in 1996, a young Frenchman named Christophe Baron walked into a field in Northeastern Oregon where a farmer had recently ripped out his plum orchard. There Baron encountered a field of basalt cobblestones, smoothed by thousands of years of erosion and river torrents; an ancient riverbed, an alluvial fan close to 4,000 acres in size and 200 feet deep in spots. For Baron, the stones evoked the galets roulés (literally “rolled stones”) of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and he surmised that they may possess similar properties of heat absorption and water retention. A year later he founded his winery, Cayuse.

Right out of the gate Baron’s wines displayed an astonishing originality. By then the American Rhône movement was well underway in California, with hundreds of acres of new plantings, mostly to Syrah. Yet not a single California Syrah tasted like this one. Bold, singular, and full of character, the Cayuse wines captured the variety’s feral savor like no other domestic wine had to date. 

In the next two decades Rocks plantings exploded, as wineries like Reynvaan, Charles Smith’s K Vintners, Rotie, Dusted Valley, Saviah, and Sleight of Hand garnered plenty of critical acclaim, and Cayuse became the standard bearer for the region. Plantings stand at 650 acres, and are on the rise, an anomaly in the Columbia Valley. Interest in the region has declined, as has its vineyard acreage. 

Rocks soils, naturally, are behind the outré aromatics found in Rocks wines. Just as in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the cobblestones are only part of the mix. Soil is scarce, but what’s there is complex: a mélange of decomposed stones, windblown loess, and residual deposits from the Missoula Floods, the recurring Ice Age cataclysm that scoured the lands east of the Cascades and redistributed soils for millions of acres. How these recombine beneath the surface determines the wines’ flavor profiles, whether it’s all funk all the time, or whether there are levels of refinement.

As for those slack palate textures, sometimes this is simply a consequence of ripeness—the riper the fruit, the more flaccid the texture. Over the years growers have learned to reconfigure their vineyards to slow down ripening, and keep the fruit vibrant up until harvest. In his biodynamically farmed Horsepower Vineyard, Christophe Baron now trains its vines on tall vertical stakes reminiscent of Côte-Rôtie in the Northern Rhône. The space between rows, just 3.5 feet, is exceedingly narrow. With such narrow spacing, the vines shade each other, slowing sugar development and fruit maturity in the clusters. “The shadows create their own microclimate,” says Baron. “The crop gets another week at least to hang.” 

Sometimes such decisions are made out of necessity. The Robertson family established Delmas Wines after purchasing an existing vineyard, now called SJR, in 2007, at the southern boundary of the valley. It was an anomalous property, with richer soils and less wind, leaving the vines vulnerable to severe winter freezes that are now more common in the appellation owing to climate change. Three times, in a single decade, deep freezes damaged SJR vines down to their trunks.

Then Brooke Delmas Robertson came up with a design she’s taken to calling MHT, which is short for mini head-trained. The configuration looks sort of like a bonsai vine; low-to-the-ground, and close to the stones. Doing so has not only made the vines easier to protect, but also expose the fruit to more radial heat from the stones themselves, even though the fruit was shaded. Ultimately the change slowed growth, altered yields, and improved phenolic intensity and texture.

Todd and Carrie Alexander’s decision to make wine in the Pacific Northwest was inspired by a Rocks wine, a single-vineyard Grenache from K Vintners called The Boy. It was so striking that Todd left a burgeoning career in the Napa Valley (where he’d made wine for Bryant Family, among other heavyweights) to start a new chapter. He’s long been a booster: He’s drawn from the Rocks for several bottlings including his own labels, Force Majeure and Holocene, and recently expanded his repertoire with a new winery project with a new entity, the Walla Walla Land Company, or WWLC. 

After buying existing vineyards and developing a third, WWLC finds itself the largest landowner in the Rocks. Alexander is thrilled to have three different fruit sources, from vineyards planted to different trellising systems, including a version of Robertson’s MHT. The result, says Alexander, is a range of flavors. “It’s definitely not monochromatic,” he says. “The Rocks are full of nuance, if you’re paying attention.” 

Alexander acknowledges that “palate softness” can still be an issue, but feels the diversity of sites helps to remedy that. The chemistry of Rocks soils—low-acid, high-alkaline—can account for those softer textures, he says. That softness, measured in pH, can hover around 4.0 in finished wines. (The pH for most Syrah wines hovers around 3.7.) In most parts of the world, that figure signifies an unstable wine, but not in the Rocks.

Greg Harrington and Brandon Moss of Gramercy Cellars, who self-identify as acid heads, have worked with Rocks fruit for more than 15 years. They typically employ whole-cluster fermentation to firm up the texture, blend Rocks fruit with grapes from cooler-climate Walla Walla sources, and not least, add Viognier. Its mysterious contribution operates much as it does in Côte-Rôtie, refining and clarifying flavors and textures. 

Some of the more texturally thrilling wines from the Rocks comes from Peter Devison, who with his wife Kelsey founded Devison Vintners in 2019. After working with several Rocks vineyards and encountering, to varying degrees, the problems with mouthfeel, Devison started to finish some of his Rocks wines in concrete vessels. In bottlings like his Beneath the Stones Syrah, the vessel interacts with the fruit and lends a barely perceptible dustiness to the texture, filling in the softer contours of the wine with a grippy new foothold. 

Few have worked harder to go against type than Doug Frost. With his partner Brad Bergman, Frost founded Echolands in 2018, bringing to the Walla Walla winemaking community a palate of exceptional refinement as only an MS/MW can. He has a palate trained toward nervy, vibrant, acid-driven wines. And so when he was offered fruit from the Rocks (an estimable Rocks site called Rivière-Galets) he found he couldn’t say no. It helped that the fruit was Grenache and Cinsault, both late ripening, acid-retaining varieties. He chose to blend them with cooler sites like Les Collines and Blue Mountain. If you think the Rocks imprint on these wines would somehow be mitigated, you’d be wrong. 

The Cinsault is for chilling and swilling, a delicious, strawberry-scented quaffer with just a bit of funk. The Rocksy Music Grenache bottling is so named because, like an aromatic earworm, the stones always have their say. Despite Frost picking weeks earlier than his peers, despite fermentation in steel drums, the Rocks aromatics show through—funk in a slightly brighter register maybe, but funky all the same, with a bright, nervy palate texture that’s lively and red-fruited. “You can try to ‘unrocks’ the fruit,” he says, “pick early, keep the wine primary, and you’ll still get those distinctive aromatics, the bloody, smoky, leathery funk.” But such efforts only go so far, because, as he puts it, “The Rocks don’t give a shit.”

Walla Walla Wines to Seek Out

2021 Big Table Farm Funk Estate Vineyard Syrah ($74) 

Brian Marcy's interest in Syrah begins in the Napa cellars of Bruce Neyers, the American Rhône pioneer. He now makes Pinot and Chardonnay in Oregon, and brings that Pinot-maker’s sensibility to this exotic beauty, where clove, nutmeg, and smoke adorn cherry in this reserved and red-fruited effort. 

2022 Devison Beneath the Stones Stoney Vine Vineyard Syrah ($54) 

Pete Devison makes three Rocks wines. This is the most ethereal and the brightest, with scents of thyme and lavender, pink peppercorn and red plum. The flavors are tense and lacy, and the tannins have a give and a vibrancy that’s rare—and welcome—in Rocks wines. 

2021 Valdemar Estates Syrah ($65)

From the Bujanda family of Rioja, who expanded into Walla Walla in 2019. This is a blend of their three Walla Walla vineyards; including the Rocks planting, it’s dense, dark, and figgy, built to age, with light-bending tannins and penetrating fruit. 

2019 Delmas SJR Vineyard Estate Syrah ($90) 

This estate Syrah is lively and youthful for a 5-year-old. Slightly smoky, with scents of clove and horehound, lavender and dark plum, it’s focused and dark with melty, crushed plum-skin tannins.

2021 Force Majeure SJR Vineyard Syrah ($100) 

Impressively concentrated when first poured. Opens with a figgy aromatic note. The flavors lean to the savory—dark-spiced, supporting a plummy core, with pliant tannins.

2023 Echolands Rocksy Music Grenache ($45) 

Blended from Les Collines and Rivière-Galets vineyards, this crisp red is smoky and slightly meaty, with aromas of pepper and bramble, and crunchy, red raspberry flavors. It’s young, full of tension and drive, and against Rocks type but for the hint of aromatic funk. 

2011 Gramercy Cellars SJR Vineyard Syrah (NA)

A study in how Rocks fruit ages, and how it responds to cool vintages. The aromas—blood, iodide, clove, five-spice, and fig—are high-toned and concentrated. The cool vintage has compressed the wine’s texture; it’s quietly and totally alive at 13 years.