Kathy and I look forward to the summer. We spend lots of time at Lake Chelan in our 30+-year-old single wide at a very comfortable family resort. We can barely see the lake from our little abode, but it is just a short two minutes or less walk to a nice grassy beach. We do a lot of wine tasting during this time, either visiting the local wineries or just enjoying a nice Wapato Cellars’ Pinot Grigio or Tsillan Cellars’ Bocciolo d’Rosa down on the beach in the late afternoon.

Most recently we visited a new winery in Chelan called Four Lakes, which has only been open for about 3 or 4 months. It took a little work to find it, as it is located out near the airport (yes Chelan has an airport) on Howard Flats Road. The tasting staff was not working that day, but the winemaker had opened up the winery for tasting just before we arrived. Their facility is their operations building currently, but they hope to open their tasting room in Manson sometime in late August. We had my mother with us, who doesn’t drink much wine, but we were about to show her how to determine what she liked and disliked.

The name Four Lakes comes from the future site of their tasting room where much of their grape vines are grown. It sits on the top of a hill that overlooks Wapato Lake, Roses Lake, Dry Lake and Lake Chelan: thus, Four Lakes. Their wines are good and their Merlot has just won an award in Southern California. I was partial to their Cabernet Sauvignon. My mom enjoyed their Riesling and took a bottle home with her. The winemaker is probably in his late 20’s early 30’s and it was fun conversing with him.

We finished the day by visiting Benson Vineyards, one of our favorites, and had dinner and wine at Wapato Cellars. We learned that Lake Chelan Winery had a large number of guests for their Falling Cow Country Wine Festival, which featured Ray Sandidge’s new releases named after the cow that fell on a vehicle near Manson a little over a year ago and received national recognition. All in all it was our typical, nice relaxing day enjoying wine and food at Lake Chelan.

Bruce Campbell

How many of you have at some time bought a bottle of wine because of the label?

All of us have our favorite things to do. These hobbies, or passions, might be knitting, sewing, gardening, woodworking, sampling wine, reading, hunting, fishing, or numerous other activities. It is often fortunate and surprising that some of our passions overlap in our lives. I have experienced this as my passion for fly fishing and my passion for wine have come together, and as I have indicated earlier, when my fishing buddy, Barney (nickname … long story), and I plan our outings or while we are out on one of our adventures. In the past, one of the wines we shared was a nice Chardonnay from the Sawtooth Winery in Nampa, Idaho, which is located in the southwest part of the state not far from Boise. The wine is made from 100% Chardonnay grapes and was quite tasty out in the wilds of Montana.

I recently was pouring (get the pun?) over my newest edition of “Northwest Fly Fishing” magazine when I came across a small article about the Sawtooth Winery wines - in a fly fishing magazine! I have every edition of this magazine from its first edition, and the first-ever article about alcohol is about a winery whose wines I have personally sampled. For me, the unique thing about the wine is the label, which shows the snowcapped Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho in the background with a stream in the foreground. This is most likely the Snake River, as the Idaho portion of the Snake River is a major fishery for fly fisherman. The label shows a fly fisherman casting his fly forward into the stream. In addition, the foil wrapper over the top of the bottle has a dry fly image stamped into the top portion and the cork in the bottle also has a dry fly image on both ends.

Many times people are attracted to a wine by the image depicted on the label, such as that of a beautiful woman in a sleek red dress or of a favorite old pick-up truck. Sometimes the attraction is an imaginative name such as “Mad Housewife”, “Lady in Red”, or “Joe Blow Red”. These labels are done for the sake of marketing, and it works. Since the first time I saw the label and bought the Chardonnay from Sawtooth, I have also purchased and enjoyed their Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Marketing is certainly the key which opens the door to many good wines.

Sawtooth Winery wines are not bold, complex, set-the-world-on-fire wines, but they have a nice smooth taste which complements many different foods without overpowering them, and are reasonably priced at somewhere between $10 to $15. I have found their wines at Food Pavilion. Sawtooth Winery was given the 2006 Winery of the Year Award by Wine Press Northwest.

Bruce Campbell 

On the scale of wineology (my word) knowledge I am at maybe stage 2.5 out of 10, so it is fun for me to find different ways to sample wines, compare or pair them with various flavors and enjoy them with friends. I realize that many of you are much higher on the scale than I, but maybe you can share with all of us some of the ways you incorporate wine into your social events by sending in ideas for the Enological Society’s website.

Kathy and I have experienced several different types of events, other than those at the Enological Society’s tastings each month, with friends. We attended a vertical tasting last winter at a friends house in East Wenatchee where we compared Fielding Hills‘ Cabernet Sauvignon from 2001 thru 2005. It was educational to be able to learn the percentages of various grapes used in the making of each of the wines and the affect that composition had on the various years.

Horizontal tasting involves picking a specific year and varietal of wine to compare, such as 2005 Syrah’s from various wineries. You can take that one step farther and make the tasting blind by putting the bottles in bags so that people do not know which wines they are tasting and rate the wines as to preferences or identify the wines from a provided list of tasting notes for each of the wines. We did this last February for the Enological Society’s Cabernet and Chocolate event. Some other suggestions might be continent tastings, regional tastings, or country tastings. The potential is limitless.

Paring wines with specific foods is another way to have a delightful event with friends. I’m sure many of you probably have done your own research on pairing wines with specific foods. Joanne Saliby has shared many possibilities for us in her newsletter articles.

I encourage you to share your experiences with events or food pairings, along with recipes, with the rest of the society on the website. E-mail your information to Beth Stone at:
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Bruce Campbell

Since I have been a member of the Enological Society, my fishing buddy and I have had a major change in how we dine when we are on a fishing trip. In the past, when planning for a trip to Montana, Idaho or somewhere in Washington, we always used to just go to the store with no forethought about what we were going to eat, and pick up such gourmet delicacies as macaroni and cheese, chili in a can or beef stew in a can. We would pick up some beer and we each had our own favorite hard liquor. We would then take off on our trip and just wing it in terms of what we would eat and drink when it came to dinner. Sometimes we would splurge and actually put some wieners in the mac and cheese to make a special meal, which was washed down with beer. Life was simple then; we didn’t know any better.

Now, before we begin a trip, we have a special meeting to plan our itinerary, our menus, and which kinds of red wines to serve. The dinners are now culinary events in which we trade off cooking and are a little fancier than in previous times. For example, for one of the nights I was to prepare a special chicken dinner, so I said I would make Chicken Cordon Bleu. Of course this had to be set up to be done on a barbecue grill and needed to be done as simply as possible. I jumped on the Internet and found some simple recipes for it and for a Mornay sauce. This called for a rich, creamy white wine, so on the way to the fishing and camping location we stopped at a local winery, where we sampled some fine white wines and selected one – a rich Chardonnay with nice citrus acidity - to go with the dinner. What a meal! As we ate, the other campers watched in amazement as we sat by the fire, savoring our evening feast. How fortunate we are to have so many choices of excellent wines here in North Central Washington.

Fishing trips will never be the same again.

Bruce Campbell

Your board has been in the process of updating and improving the Enological Society’s website, www.wenwine.org. We have hired Matt Fields, from Leavenworth to be our consultant in the process for a very reasonable price. Board member Beth Stone is the primary contact for getting information on the website. It is our hope that the redesigned website can be a source of pride for our group and will put a great face on the organization for our members and for the possible new members it might attract.

The board was able to see a preview of what the site may look like. The home page will have an overview of who we are, our history, knowledge and the fun we have, and may include some photos of past events. A contact page will include names of board members, their roles in the organization, e-mail addresses and the ability to download forms for membership or wine tasting events. Other pages will include links to wineries and vineyards around the North Central Washington area, our scheduled events, the current newsletter, as well as archives of old newsletters, links to the Washington State Wine Commission website, wine related news of interest sites, wine and food pairing sites, and other enological chapter’s sites.

We hope to include lots of photographs from our club members showing wine related events. We also might add a “members-only” access portion where we can share recipe and wine suggestions, review wine and food pairing experiences, wine country excursions, books, DVD’s, and magazines.

In the last month or so we have had to do a lot of back tracking to be able to access our website and to put us back on a server. The future look of the website, in our eyes, is to keep it simple and uncluttered, organized for ease of navigation, functional and esthetically pleasing to the eye. This will be a fluid site, meaning that there should be new things on it often so that people find it helpful, informational and will be accessing it often. Be checking to see if the website is up and running in the next week or so.

Bruce Campbell