For the collector, Washington State remains a place of tremendous promise and occasional risk. Few places in the U.S. are more naturally suited to making ageable red wines inspired by Bordeaux or the Rhône than the Columbia Valley. Cold winters, short, intense summers (with bonus hours of evening daylight) and a prolonged period of warm weather in the fall makes for an exceptional growing season, ideal for even ripening and precision picking come harvest. Overripeness and overextraction can be a cultural problem, as is the injudicious use of oak: one needs to seek out brands that are not inclined to fix what’s not broken.

As with my Oregon recommendations, the possibilities go well past my list of recommendations below, including some of the OGs like Quilceda Creek, Leonetti, and Pepper Bridge for classically made, ageable red wines inspired by Old World Reds (and let’s not forget Cayuse, who leads the charge with Rhone varieties). To this I’d  add a few other personal favorites, bottles that I’ve laid down for years and have been rewarded:  Andrew Will’s Sorella, Seven Hills’ Pentad, Doubleback’s Estate Reserve, Force Majeure’s Épinette, and L’Ecole No. 41’s fiercely mineral red blend, Ferguson. These wines will give you pleasure for decades, marked by a cedar frond and tobacco leaf savor, a Washington signature, which only grows more haunting with age, and which will put you in mind of Bordeaux. 

But what I've included here are some of Washington's too-often overlooked wineries that produce world-class, ageable wines you'd do well to invest in (or just drink). I’d also be remiss not to mention Eroica Single Berry Select, the joint effort between Ernst Loosen and Chateau Ste. Michelle. This late harvest bottling is quite simply the finest sweet wine produced in the United States.  In fact, the 2012 SBS was the only wine I ever gave a perfect 100-point score from my days as a formal tasting critic. I can still remember the shivers it sent running down my spine. I’m saving one bottle ‘til I’m a ripe old age.

Cadence Winery

Ben Smith’s first career was as an engineer at Boeing, where he conducted risk assessment on the flight control systems for its 737 and 757 commercial jets. Boeing had several extracurriculars for its employees on its sprawling Seattle campus, including a wine club. Smith started making wines with preternatural skill, focusing on Bordeaux varieties; when he started winning the annual competition with a predictable regularity, he began to consider another career path: Cadence was founded in 1998.

Since the beginning Smith has sourced his fruit from Red Mountain, this small, torrid syncline wedge (neither red, nor a mountain) that has become the hottest region (in all senses) in the Valley. Within a few years he’d planted Cara Mia there, which remains his primary source of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. 

If you have fruit on Red Mountain and are wondering when to pick, look to Ben for guidance, as he’s always the first to harvest. His wines are tense and acid-driven, with rippling textures that lay down well, managing full flavor counterbalanced by a leafy savor, consonant with the cool autumn weather of the Columbia Valley. 

Col Solare

Col Solare began as a joint venture between Chateau Ste. Michelle and the Antinori Family of Tuscany, a partnership established in 1995. After drawing from several of Ste. Michelle’s more esteemed fruit sources, the winery planted 29 acres on Red Mountain in a spectacular setting in the center of the mesa, building one of the first showcase wineries of the region (which manages to look Tuscan in the high desert locale). Last year Ste. Michelle, which has been downsizing since its sale to private equity firm Sycamore Partners in 2021, sold its share to the Antinori Family. 

The winery specializes in blends and Cabernet (a number of compelling ‘component wines’ are available to club members) and remains in good hands under the guidance of Stephanie Cohen, winemaker since 2020. That adds up to a formidable portfolio, a brooding collection of dark-fruited, basalt-dusted powerful reds, a marriage of Washington’s sunny intensity with an undergirding always feels Tuscan, sturdy as a rock foundation. Massive when first released, these wines beg for cellaring, where their build will allow for slow maturation and reward the patient. 

DeLille

In the years since Chateau Ste. Michelle has receded from the limelight, DeLille has, in its way, become the quintessential Washington winery, a standard-bearer for how many things the state does well. Generalists par excellence, they excel with Rhône blends, single vineyard wines, and whites, well-made Rieslings and especially fine Graves-inspired whites. They have been around long enough to lock up important vineyard contracts from multiple appellations, from the Yakima Valley to Snipes Mountain. 

What they do best, however, is Cabernet and blends derived from it, and that takes them to Red Mountain; they source from seven vineyards there, including founder Chris Upchurch’s eponymous vineyard, Grand Ciel, Ciel du Cheval and Klipsun. Fruit from those four vineyards goes into Four Flags, perhaps the wine most destined for the cellar. 

Jason Gorski, the winery’s Director of Winemaking has internalized Upchurch’s guiding principle, simple and impactful: “You pick when the grapes are no longer underripe,” he says. These are wines of power and deliciousness, with aromas of fig and cedar, flavors that are concentrated and lively when young, with a tensile strength to ensure a long cellar life. 

Gramercy Cellars

If you look at the collection of Washington wines in my own cellar, Gramercy tops the list. That’s in part because I’m a fan, and in part because when I taste them on release, they’re almost never ready to drink. I taste the future in them and tuck them away. 

I first met Greg Harrington, Gramercy’s founder, at Square One Restaurant in San Francisco in 1995, where he was one of the country’s youngest sommeliers. Within a few years he was running the beverage program for B.R. Guest—the influential restaurant group in New York–then for Emeril Lagasse’s properties, then the Puck properties in Vegas. But Harrington saw his future one summer evening on a Brooklyn rooftop , when he tasted a suite of Washington reds with the acidity and structure he was missing in California wines. He moved to Walla Walla to start Gramercy Cellars with the express purpose of exploring balanced, low-alcohol structured wines, built for the dining room and the cellar. His tête-de-cuvées, like the Syrah John Lewis and the Reserve Cab, should go straight to the cellar for half a decade at least.

W.T. Vintners

Like Greg Harrington, Jeff Lindsay-Thorsen came to winemaking from his work as a sommelier. For many years Lindsay-Thorsen ran the program at Seattle’s RN-74, the Michael Mina satellite of a legendary San Francisco wine bar run by Rajat Parr. RN-74 Seattle lasted longer and may have been more impactful than its SF counterpart, but for Lindsay-Thorsen it was a playground: he tasted the world through a global, deep, vertical wine list. More than most, Lindsay-Thorsen approaches Washington’s potential with a global palate, and from a global perspective. From the start he knew better than most exactly what sort of wines they wanted to make. 

For him that has meant cool climate locales. Lindsay-Thorsen focused on the Yakima Valley during his early career, working with grower Dick Boushey’s meticulously farmed Rhône selections with fruit drawn from the coolest part of one of Walla Walla’s coolest sites, Les Collines. Lately Lindsay-Thorsen has been sourcing fruit from the Columbia Gorge, for driven, dramatic whites and reds. His judicious use of whole cluster and almost no new oak combine for wines that go the cellar poised from the start.

Weathereye

The Columbia Valley spans nearly 12 million acres; it’s a region where vineyard projects can seem almost indistinguishable, like so many throw-rugs strewn across a treeless landscape. But Weathereye stands out. A ridgetop property, the first thing you notice is its wide array of trellising systems: head-trained Grenache vines protected from the winds by small stone walls, échalas-trained Syrah vines, different densities, orientations, geometric patterns. And when you look at the soil … you see there is none to speak of. It’s just rock. 

Weathereye is the brainchild of Ryan Johnson and Cameron Myhrvold ( brother to Nathan Myhrvold, one of the founders of Microsoft) who purchased 360 acres in the region, of which only about 33 proved to be plantable—to multiple varieties and multiple clones, at great expense. Until this year, Todd Alexander has been making the wines, lured up from his former Napa digs at Bryant Family. 

The wines, both whites and reds, have unprecedented build and structure, ripe, but utterly supported by mineral and textural heft that feels like a veritable terroir signature: whites rippling with an almost dusty acidity, the reds propped up by a massive–and yet massively fine–tannic weave. The vines are barely a decade old; not only is this a winery to watch, it’s a winery to cellar. And check out wines from those who purchase fruit from the site, like Liminal, Two Vintners, Kobayashi, and The Devil is a Liar.