How Sweet It Is -- Field Of Competitors Is Growing To Challenge The State's Walla Walla Onion For Its Famous Title

WALLA WALLA - Dust billows above the fields of Gerry Ruzicka's farm on a hot afternoon, stirred up by the wheels of a flatbed truck. But the prevailing smell here isn't of dust.

It's onions.

Close your eyes and breathe deeply and you're almost lifted to your favorite burger joint, so potent is the onion air.

From mid-June to early August this is onion country, land of the Walla Walla Sweet. At Ruzicka's farm and perhaps 50 others in the Walla Walla Valley, workers are pulling up the big yellow globes, cutting off their green tops and dumping them into wooden bins for the trip to the packing plant.

Red mesh sacks bulging with onions lie piled up for sale in roadside stands, while hand-lettered signs proclaim, ``GENUINE Walla Walla Sweets.''

It's a peaceful-looking farmland scene, but from the competitive claims flying across the country like Minuteman missiles, you'd think this was war. In a way, it is war - the war of the sweet onions, each variety claiming to be the sweetest.

The hometown favorite, the Walla Walla Sweet, is pitted against an ever-growing field of competitors: Georgia's famous Vidalia, California's Imperial Sweet, Hawaii's Maui, New Mexico's Carzalia, Texas' 1015 Supersweet.

Boosters of these onions brag you can chomp into them raw and get almost no hint of hot. Ruzicka, who grows 45 acres of Walla Walla Sweets, eats his onions out of hand, like an apple.

The onions also get celebrities' attention. Johnny Carson sidekick Ed McMahon, golfer Arnold Palmer and House Speaker Tom Foley of Spokane all have ordered or received gift packs of Walla Walla Sweets, say staffers at the Walla Walla Gardeners Association, the biggest packer of Walla Walla Sweets.

Local boosters are gearing up for the sixth annual Walla Walla Sweet Onion Festival on July 29, when once again the aromatic orbs will battle it out for the title of sweetest in a blind taste test.

If the past is prelude, the Walla Walla Sweet will win, as it has in most of the previous contests here. Oddly, in blind taste tests of sweet onions held around the country, the hometown onion usually wins - kind of like a baseball team playing on its home turf. Wes Colley, chairman of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Commission, acknowledges this, but he can't explain it.

One theory lies in the varieties' different harvest seasons. Some people say the older the onion, the stronger it tastes. Georgia's Vidalia onion, for instance, is harvested in May and June. By the time of the Walla Walla taste test in late July, a Vidalia would be older and possibly stronger tasting than the local onion.

But Brian Magnaghi, manager of Walla Walla Gardeners Association, says he's never heard this theory. He says that properly stored onions stay mild, and he doesn't know why hometown onions win taste tests.

Over at Cavalli's Onion Acres Farm a few miles from the Ruzicka place, Gayle Cavalli dimisses the sweet-onion rivalry as ``mainly something to talk about.'' But Ben, her husband, says even visitors from Vidalia, Ga., have told him ``there's no comparison. They like ours better.''

He admits, though, that the Texas 1015 - named for its recommended planting date, Oct. 15 - comes ``awfully close'' to the Walla Walla Sweet, and a local supermarket produce manager agrees.

In The Seattle Times test kitchen, tasters of raw Walla Walla Sweets found them juicy - they're extra-high in water - but varied in taste. Three of them were very mild compared with the ordinary white onions also sampled, but a fourth was quite strong. Cooked Walla Wallas were mild and sweet.

Whichever onion wins the taste test in Walla Walla, tears won't flow because this is a war with many winners. Sweet onions have different harvest seasons (an exception, the Maui, is harvested much of the year) and mostly regional markets, so they're not seriously competing. This makes the rivalries a marketing dream: The more publicity all the sweet onions get, the more they all sell.

But for farmers, there's a hitch: The onions must be grown in just the right spot on the map. For Walla Walla Sweets, this means the Walla Walla Valley, which is most of Walla Walla County in Southeastern Washington and a small part of Umatilla County in Northeastern Oregon.

Onions grown from the same kind of seeds but outside these boundaries don't qualify to bear the

official seal that says ``Genuine Walla Walla Sweet Onions'' - no matter what they taste like.

Some farmers outside the valley complain to Colley, of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Commission, which drew up the boundaries and the seal. They say their onions are just as good, boundary or no boundary.

``We don't think they're quite as good,'' Colley says. Besides, he says, ``there would be no stopping'' if the boundaries were extended, because farmers farther and farther away would want in.

Colley admits, however, that he doesn't really like onions. As chairman of the onion commission (he's also president of Walla Walla's Bank of the West), he simply handles the administrative chores.

The Walla Walla Sweet's breeding - making it lower in sulphur compounds than ordinary onions - explains most of its mildness, authorities say. It also has more sugar.

But farmers also vaguely credit the valley's climate and soil, and Bill Dean, a horticulturist with Washington State University, says the soils' low sulphur level does contribute.

The Walla Walla Sweet, or its ancestor, has been grown here for nearly a century. Local lore says that around 1900 a French settler named Peter Pieri imported the seeds of an Italian onion whose winter hardiness made it popular with valley farmers. The onion grew milder and sweeter with selective breeding, and came to be known as the Walla Walla Sweet.

Japanese cooks could be slicing Walla Walla Sweets in the future. WSU is researching that market, and there'll be a Walla Walla Sweet onion tasting in Tokyo tomorrow for Japanese food-industry people.

Damaging spring rains took a toll on the current crop, and acreage is down, farmers say, because new labor laws complicate labor-intensive onion growing. Magnaghi estimates a harvest of 500,000 sacks (50 pounds each) - down from last year's 600,000 and 1987's record 876,000.

As usual, onion lovers are trekking to this valley to load up on the globes, and farmers themselves are devouring their share. The Ruzickas - Gerry, his wife, Mary, and their sons Seth, 10, and Adam, 7 - say they eat onions nearly every day.

And Gayle Cavalli says: ``Before Ben and I got married, he told me I either had to put onions and garlic in it or chocolate on it or he wouldn't eat it, and that's just about the truth.''