Wine Adventures in Central Washington
Eastern Washington State is a paradise for both wine and outdoor recreation. Here are three great destinations where you can taste wine at the vineyard and also enjoy an outdoor adventure.
Red Mountain Trails Guided Rides
Bike tour through the vineyards. Photo credit: Red Mountain Trails.
Head down to the Red Mountain American Viticultural Area (AVA), east of Benton, for an adventure that combines a guided ride through the vineyards and a chance to taste wine produced from those grapes. Pick your favorite activity: Red Mountain Trails offers horseback rides, wagon rides, and bike rides through the “sea of vines” that make up the area’s vineyards. The bike tours, which can include up to 6 people, go through gentle terrain on lightly travelled roads, making them perfect even for inexperienced riders. The tours are at least 3½ hours long. They stop at three tasting rooms and include lunch (usually a charcuterie board). If classes are more your thing, Red Mountain Trails offers classes for the homesteader in you with everything from making soap or bath goods with goat milk to candle making and blending herbal/floral teas, hat burning, farm work with draft horses, horse therapy, canning and more. At the end of your ride, sit around the outdoor fire pit and enjoy the beauty of an Eastern Washington afternoon, or use the Taste NW web map to find nearby tasting rooms, including Kiona Vineyards, and discover what makes this AVA so special.
2. Wine, Music, and Trails at Cave B Estate Winery
Tasting in the garden. Photo credit: Cave B.
Discover a landscape carved by the catastrophic Great Missoula Floods while tasting wines from the Royal Slope AVA at Cave B Estate Winery, set on the cliffs above the Columbia River south of Wenatchee. This destination offers everything you might want for a summer adventure with wine tastings, hiking, and music. Enjoy six preselected wines, three red and three white, that you can pair with small plates that are available for purchase. The winery has an indoor tasting room and outdoor patio, where you can enjoy spectacular views of the Columbia in a garden setting. For music lovers, pair a concert at the Gorge Amphitheater with a tasting at Cave B. The Gorge was originally part of the winery, and during concerts at the Gorge, you can walk over to the tasting room for special concert tastings, enjoy a pre-show concert at Cave B’s Stage B Amphitheater, and even get pizza from Camp Pizza, which brings their truck to the winery on concert days. If you like to run, check out the Caveman Roar 'n' Pour 5K trail run/walk & wine tasting held every April: in 2024, the event will be held on April 20th. For a nearby outdoor adventure, hike the cliffs at Frenchman Coulee or walk through Ancient Lakes in the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area/Quincy Lakes Unit and experience a landscape carved by Ice Age Floods. Frenchman Coulee is just North of I-90 and south of the winery, and Ancient Lakes is North of the winery: both are owned by WDFW and require a Discover Pass.
The Great Missoula Floods
The landscape around Cave B was carved by a series of giant floods that swept across Eastern Washington during the end of the last Ice Age, 18,000-15,000 years ago. This cycle would start with the formation of an ice dam on the Clark Fork River, which would create a 3,000-square-mile lake, known as Glacial Lake Missoula, which contained more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. Over time, the ice dam would fail, releasing all of the water in as little as 48 hours, cutting deep canyons, known as coulees, and digging pothole lakes. Find more about the floods here or on the Ice Age Floods Institute page here.
3. Enjoy Wine and Explore the Cowiche Canyon Conservancy at Wilridge Vineyards
Photo by Wilridge Vineyards.
For a tasting destination with the opportunity to walk through the vineyard or walk an extensive network of trails through the shrub steppe, head over to Wilridge Estate Vineyard in the Naches Heights AVA. The Wilridge Orchard, planted in 2007, is certified organic and biodynamic. If spirits are more your thing, try their artisan brandy, distilled from the grapes, apples, and pears grown at the winery. You can enjoy a picnic on the winery lawn, wander through the estate’s vineyards, or head down the Vineyard Trail that takes you directly from the winery into the Cowiche Canyon Conservancy trail system (that crosses the conservancy and adjacent public lands). This unique landscape is made up of sagebrush, grasslands, flowering meadows, oak woodlands, and basalt cliffs. Wednesday evenings in the summer, you can enjoy live music and a selection of food trucks. Wilridge also hosts a 5K, the Wilridge Wine Run, for both runners and walkers: the 2024 event will be held on June 7th.
