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Wine

Bus at WSU Prosser
Summer 2019

Prosser stories

 

Over a century, Washington State University’s research and extension center has seen a lot of stories and fostered a lot of innovations. Read some of them at these links:

 

The Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center at Prosser website

HistoryLink essay on WSU Prosser by Elizabeth Gibson (drawing heavily on the essays by Singleton and Proebsting)

AgWeatherNet is the world’s largest public-access weather system updates every 15 minutes via data collected from over 175 stations.

For years, WSU Prosser was the home of WSU’s wine science research. With … » More …

Dave "Merf" Merfeld (Photo Kevin Cruff)
Fall 2018

Cornfields to vineyards

“I quit working in 1996,” says master winemaker David “Merf” Merfeld ’13. That was the year he got a job at Bert Grant’s Brewery in Yakima—one of the early craft breweries in the region.

Merf’s passion for fermentation started in his kitchen a few years earlier. He’d driven west to Seattle from the family farm in Iowa. “Thirty, thirty-one hours straight through,” he says, with maybe an “hour stop for a rain storm in South Dakota.” He was in the ’79 Park Avenue his dad gave him: “a great ride, and everything I owned fit in that car.” The first thing he and the buddy … » More …

Wine labels
Fall 2018

Designer labels

 

Every wine has a tale and deserves a wine label that can tell that story

 

That’s what motivates Jim Carey (‘78 Comm.) and Jim Craig from Doubleknot Creative in Seattle, a branding and design firm that has carved out a niche crafting the artwork that graces many Washington vintages.

The designers have seen wine labels in Washington evolve along with the varietals and the state’s wine industry as a whole. Washington wines continue to build reputation and credibility, and going against big hitters like California’s Napa Valley, “world-class wine deserves world-class packaging,” says Craig, the creative director of the firm.

Most of all, … » More …