Rousanne rows at Rockgarden Vineyard in Spring 2019. Added a filter to make the cobbles pop; in fairness, when you’re at the vineyard it is so rocky as to be hard to walk, so this image might capture the experience better than the unedited image would.
Rockgarden Vineyard
Rockgarden Vineyard sits near the southeastern corner of the Rocks District of Milton Freewater, and has (since 2015) been named as a separate sub-AVA of the broader Walla Walla Valley AVA. The rocks district is distinguished by its geology. What passes for soil is mostly fist-sized river cobbles left behind as the Walla Walla river shifted course to the north. These cobbles lead to unusual underlying hydrology and seem to increase the heat in the vineyard, leading to a somewhat more reliable ripening curve. Because the rocks district is on the valley floor (935 feet altitude at Rockgarden Vineyard), it is disproportionately affected by frost and cold air events, so yields year-to-year are somewhat inconsistent. From a winemaking perspective, the distinctive features of fruit grown in this region are elevated must pH and a tendency toward somewhat unusual, but often interesting reductive aromatics (the aromas of reduced sulfur compounds). Wines are generally soft, ripe-fruited, and sometimes have a strong earthy-mineral character that is really its own thing, but echoes aromas associated with Burgundy and the Northern Rhone. (This is not literally the minerals from the soil ending up in the wine, but is a positive/complexity dimension of the reductive tendency in these musts.)
Rockgarden Vineyard itself is planted mostly to Syrah, with smaller blocks of Cabernet, Mourvèdre, and Grenache. There are a few rows of Roussanne and Marsanne in the northwest corner of the vineyard. I had initially planned to work with the Roussanne, but in 2019 an atypical rain event substantially degraded the fruit—a risk especially with the organic farming practices used in the vineyard. Nina Buty, the then owner of the vineyard, offered to move my contract to the neighboring block of Marsanne, of which there was a small quantity still available. This fruit was in many ways typical of the Rocks, even at the lower ripeness level and higher harvest acidity I aim for in amber wines: higher pH relative to the sugar level, higher level of mature fruit character, again relative to the sugar level, and a tendency toward reductive characteristics in the cellar that added positive complexity.
I don’t have a long term contract for this fruit, and the vineyard changed hands recently, so I don’t know whether I will end up working with this fruit again in the future, but it has certainly been interesting to see how white grapes perform in this area largely devoted to red varieties. You can taste the results for yourself in the Marginalia 2019 Amber Wine.