The Cellar at The Walls Winery

OUR WINES

“We take wine seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously”
-Mike Martin

The Walls wines are simultaneously eclectic and classic. We’re meticulous in the vineyard and the cellar, but we’re willing to get a little experimental when curiosity beckons. Our fruit comes from Red Mountain, The Rocks District, Yakima Valley, and the Columbia Gorge, including our three estate vineyards and a tight group of other growers we trust. 

While we’re inspired by European wines, one of the nice things about being an American wine brand is freedom from rigidity. Rhône, Bordeaux, and Portuguese grape varieties are the core of our program, but we also love chardonnay and aren’t afraid to follow opportunities as they present themselves.

INSPIRED BY PLACE

WineS WITH STORIES TO TELL

We make a lot of serious wine designed to age beautifully for decades, because it’s nice to have something to look forward to. We also make rosé in a pouch, because life should be fun. Our vineyards’ prime location in the Rocks District and Columbia Valley means Rhône and Bordeaux grape varieties are our specialty, but we’re also excited about some other, perhaps more obscure (for now) varieties like picpoul, tinta cão, and sezão. Our second, extremely limited PÁŠXA label encapsulates everything we’ve learned about the Rocks District over the last decade. 

Great wine is all about place. But wine isn’t the only interesting thing about a place, even one as wine-centric as Walla Walla. We’re inspired by everything about this beautiful, remote, rocky valley we call home, from the first peoples who lived here to the latest arrivals drawn by the magnetism of great wine and food. Some of our wines are inspired by history. Some by literature. Some even by our dear friend Stanley Groovy, a man who doesn’t exist in reality but lives, in some small way, in the heart of every person who sees a wall and thinks, I wonder what the view’s like from up there?

Vineyard work at The Walls Vineyard
Cellar barrels at The Walls
Glass walls showing the wine cellar at The Walls Vineyard

A bottle of wine is a culmination of hundreds of tiny choices, each one critical, each one with the potential to radically alter the trajectory of what’s in your glass. Everything’s important, from the subtle slope of the vineyard to the age of the barrel the wine rests in. 

Some might find that intimidating. We find it invigorating.

THOUGHTFULLY GROWN & METICULOUSLY CRAFTED

Winemaking Philosophy

We generally take a less-is-more approach in the winery. That doesn’t mean we’re dogmatic, but we operate with an underlying philosophy that the best, highest purpose of the winemaker is to get great fruit and then (mostly) get out of the way. Doing that well requires paying very, very close attention — what we call meticulous winemaking.

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In practice, that means there are a lot of different ways to get to vineyard expression and wines of incredible quality. We use almost entirely neutral oak, and favor bigger casks like pipes, demi-muids, and foudres to keep that oak character subtle. We also love the way concrete works on our wines, delivering transparent, practically incandescent expressions of the best places in the Northwest to grow grapes. Most of our reds spend somewhere between 12 and 22 months in oak, while our whites might spend their entire development in concrete.

Because of that hands-off approach, our wines tend to show a lot of vintage variation. That keeps things interesting (for us, and for you). Our focus on Rhône, Bordeaux, and Portuguese varieties means we also take blending very, very seriously. Assembling each year’s vintage is an exercise in balance, and no two batches are exactly the same.

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