Hendricks' hardy grapes helped put valley's wineries on the map

WALLA WALLA — Puffy clouds drift across a spring sky over the Walla Walla Valley and band together on the still-snowy peaks of the Blue Mountains to the east.

It's the kind of day Scott Hendricks and his dad used to enjoy on scouting trips to explore the valley's jigsaw-puzzle terrain for its grape-growing prospects.

Outside the family farmhouse of his Windrow Vineyards on this recent day, the 51-year-old Hendricks studies shoots emerging from an old, gnarled cabernet sauvignon vine.

With the reverence of a proud father, he makes a point of saying the vine and others around it have survived three winters of minus 10-degree freezes since he planted them nearly two decades ago.

"Cabernet sauvignon just loves the Walla Walla Valley — and vice versa," said Hendricks, one of the leading vineyard consultants and managers in a valley known for its ultra-premium Bordeaux-style wines. "For that, I am eternally grateful."

In the shadows

When people poke around wine country here, they probably already know about Woodward Canyon, L'Ecole No. 41 and Leonetti Cellar.

Established between 1978 and 1983, the three oldest wineries in the Walla Walla Valley are known around the world.

They and dozens of wineries that followed have recast the image of Walla Walla as an out-of-the-way farm town near the Washington-Oregon border to one with a booming reputation for Bordeaux-style blends.

But through all the growth, there has been a lesser-known name in the valley's wine evolution — the Hendricks family.

Scott Hendricks' father, Herbert, the local physician, established a commercial vineyard in the valley two decades ago. (The only other commercial vineyard had been established in the 1950s, but abandoned after a bitter freeze.)

It was an educated gamble. But had the doctor not taken the risk of planting Seven Hills Vineyard in 1980, the Walla Walla Valley could still be plodding toward, instead of holding down, a spot in the upper echelons of the premium wine world.

"What (Seven Hills) did was establish the fact that quality grapes could be produced commercially here — not just grapes, but quality grapes," said Stan Clarke, a veteran Columbia and Yakima Valley viticulturist and coordinator at Walla Walla Community College's Institute for Enology and Viticulture.

At least 40 wineries have made the Walla Walla Valley home, with 30 of those arriving during the past five years.

And the range of grapes grown in the valley, initially chardonnay and those used for Bordeaux-style blends, today includes some 20 varietals native to the Rhône and Burgundy regions of France, along with Italian and German varietals.

Grape-growing gamble

The elder Hendricks, who died in 1997, wrought Seven Hills Vineyard out of an alfalfa field on the family farm beneath a ridge on the Oregon side of the Walla Walla Valley, near Milton-Freewater.

"I don't think there was a thousand acres of grapes in the whole Pacific Northwest at that time," Scott Hendricks said.

Hendricks said his father planted Seven Hills after spending time investigating wines and grape-growing with researchers at the Washington State University agriculture extension in Prosser.

The elder Hendricks' intent was to add to the diversity of the orchard and field crops grown on the family's land in Umatilla County in Oregon.

Before Seven Hills was planted, Leonetti and Woodward Canyon had their own small estate vineyard plots, but were relying on the more established vineyards in the Yakima and Columbia valleys for the bulk of their grapes.

But when Seven Hills' five acres of cabernet sauvignon bore their first crop in 1983, the two wineries and newcomer L'Ecole found in their backyards a new, larger palette of local flavors and complexities to work into their blends.

So did a number of local home vintners who later started such top-rated Bordeaux-style commercial wineries as Bunchgrass Winery and Walla Walla Vintners.

Fellow physician James McClellan joined Hendricks in a partnership in 1983 that set the stage for expanding Seven Hills' "Old Block" vineyard to its current 43 acres. The Hendrickses and McClellans established Seven Hills Winery in 1988, with McClellan's son Casey as winemaker.

In 1995, the Hendricks family sold their share in the winery to the McClellans and part of their vineyard holdings and the Seven Hills name to Norm McKibben, who today has financial and management interests in about 700 vineyard acres in the valley.

Scott Hendricks then formed Windrow Vineyards, 18 acres carved out of the Old Block Seven Hills acreage in the sale. He also started Windrow Management, his vineyard consulting and management business.

His 20-year-old son, Gage, now handles vineyard construction and operations.

Plowing new ground

Among the 30,000 acres growing wine grapes statewide today, Hendricks estimates the Walla Walla Valley wine-growing region cultivates about 1,250 acres, 450 of which lie in the appellation's Oregon turf in Umatilla County.

The amount of grapes produced each year in the valley is relatively small — "a good day's run for Mondavi," Hendricks said — but there are still undiscovered and proven sites that could add significantly to the total vineyard acreage.

"While it might be nice to have and use formulas for growing grapes," he said, "you have to go out and talk to the vineyards and say, 'How do you like that?' It's like raising children. You can get Dr. Spock's manual, but it's only advice."

Standing over a topographical map spread across his dining room table, Hendricks explains the valley's "bathtub" of wind- and glacier-deposited soils, undulating geography, river and creek drainages and varying microclimates.

It's a hodge-podge of nature that allows a vineyard in one spot to flourish, but render barren another a few hundred yards away.

One site may yield prized grapes of a certain varietal, but won't support others, or if it does, the wines are inferior to those made from the same varietal at another site a short distance away, he said.

Hendricks has learned, sometimes the hard way, that such things as a few dozen feet in elevation, a different angle to the sun, and proximity to air flows that minimize frost can make all the difference.

"People come here and think, 'Yeah, it's all the same.' But it's not," Hendricks said.

Sorting through the patchwork and matching the varietal to each site is what Hendricks does as a vineyard consultant.

Some of his clients, many of whom are valley farmers wanting to diversify their crops as his father did, heed his experience-bred advice. "Farmers as clients are great," he said. "They are the first to realize that when you don't know a lot about something, you find out yourself or ask someone who does."

But others, mostly outsiders eager for a stake in the valley's burgeoning wine industry because of its reputation, don't listen; instead, they learn the hard way.

Which is how Herbert Hendricks and his son learned: as pioneers who expected to take the hardest knocks as they broke new ground.

"I've made 22 years of mistakes," Scott Hendricks said. "Nobody should have to make those mistakes again."

Thomas P. Skeen can be reached at 509-525-3300 or by e-mail at tskeen@ubnet.com.