The many waters of the Walla Walla River begin in the Blue Mountains in small trickles of snowmelt and natural springs. Each little stream gathers momentum and size as the mountains turn to one of several steep canyons, which are the watersheds of the Valley - a feature that influences today’s viticulture. Each of these watersheds is also an air drainage, which together and separately funnel a mix of warm, cold, wet and dry air, which travels the region and bumps into this beautiful mountain range. These above ground waters and deep underground wells provide irrigation for the region.

Millions of years earlier, during the Cenozoic era, the soils of our area were created by a series of unique cataclysmic events. Arguably one of the earth's largest basalt flows covered the Columbia Plateau where much winegrowing takes place. This contribution from deep in the earth covered ancient strata and ocean beds, and it is our good fortune that the earth does gift the ocean floor back to the surface in the ash coming from the volcanic peaks of the Cascades.

The other unique cataclysm that affected this area was huge floods created by glaciers of the ice age. Continental glaciers dammed huge pools of water only to spill the contents in unimaginable rushes of water that not only tore channels in the basalt but also brought granite rocks from the far north to add to the mix of parent materials of our unique soils. Much of the soil in the Walla Walla Valley is a blown in mix called loess. These soils containing particles from hundreds of square miles were piled in hills and were sometimes reworked by local streams and mixed with cobbles from the Blue Mountains. Fire and ice made a fine mix of elements for the roots of grapes to explore as they put together the flavors that help define our unique terroir. It would be hard to find soils as complex, nourishing the roots of vines elsewhere.