Backtracking: wine trip

This post is also intended to catch up on spring doings in the Great Northwest. Last weekend we drove out to Eastern Washington for our customary wine tasting and buying. There are many more wineries in the Yakima Valley than there were just a few years ago, and building continues.

We kept it pretty low key this time and only did about a dozen wineries over two days. My favorites remain Hinzerling Winery's ports and sherries and all of the whites at Blackwood Canyon. The photos were taken at Blackwood, which is the product of the obsessive experimentation of winemaker/owner Michael Moore. He is now producing wines which have spent as many as eight years on the lees, something some would say is not even a possibility. The results are amazing: aromas of petroleoum, ocean beaches and moss, just to list a few impressions. As you can imagine, long term winemaking requires a price tag to match, so we never buy more than one bottle per trip.


We brought along Dirk and Luzie, new friends here from Germany in connection with Dirk's post-doc research. This trip included a new stop in Union Gap, a tiny town near Yakima. Union Gap is known for a little tamale restaurant called Los Hernandez. They do make an amazing tamal indeed, thanks to hand ground masa that starts out as fresh corn. I didn't take any pictures, but if Dirk has put a photo of the place on his blog, I will link to it.