Spoken Wines

09/08/2026

Can you identify a wine grape by its leaf? 🍃🍷

Before the grapes ripen, the leaves are already leaving clues.

Look closely at three things: the overall shape, the depth of the cuts, and the opening where the leaf meets the stem.

🍇 Cabernet Sauvignon: deeply cut lobes with enclosed openings that look almost like eyes 🍇 Merlot: a more open, maple-like shape 🍇 Chardonnay: broader and rounder, with shallower cuts

Identifying vines by their leaves is called ampelography. A leaf is only one clue, but once you know what to notice, a vineyard begins to look completely different.

Save this for your next wine-country visit. Which leaf fooled you?

09/01/2026

“Coopetition.” That’s the word one Walla Walla winemaker uses to describe why the region’s wine keeps getting better. When your neighbors are your competition and your quality bar, everyone wins. Even Dunham.

This is why a glass of Walla Walla wine means something. The whole region holds itself to a standard, so you’re never getting an average pour. 🍷

08/24/2026

Only about eight barrels of this wine are made each year. And every vintage is honored with a different piece of Eric’s artwork.

But the most remarkable part may be what happens after bottling.

Years later, this wine is still revealing something new, including its underlying cherry-cola character.

Some wines reward patience.

08/23/2026

Which Italian wine region matches what's already in your glass? 🇮🇹

Swipe through 5 regions, each with its own personality:

🏰 Tuscany: familiar, food friendly Sangiovese
⛰️ Piedmont: structured Nebbiolo that rewards patience
🍇 Valpolicella: rich Amarone with serious depth
🌋 Sicily: volcanic energy from Mount Etna
❄️ Alto Adige: crisp, precise whites from the mountains

Next time someone asks what Italian wine to try, you'll have an answer (and a reason why).

Full breakdown on the blog, link in bio.

08/12/2026

This dog almost died behind a neighbor's fence.

Eric saved him, nursed him back by hand, and watched him become the unofficial greeter at Dunham Cellars for five years straight.

When they needed an easy, approachable wine, the label decision made itself.

Meet Port. Yes, that's really his name on the bottle.

08/05/2026

This Walla Walla winery is housed in a WWII hangar that once trained B-17 and B-24 bomber crews.

Decades later, Eric Dunham walked in with a different mission: make wine, one bottle at a time. No fancy equipment. Just hand corked bottles and a family willing to bet on him.

Today that same hangar holds barrels instead of bombers. Next time you pour a glass of Dunham, you're drinking from a building with two very different histories.

Full story on Spoken Wines. Link in bio.

07/27/2026

He wasn’t even looking for land.

He was fly-fishing.

Coming back down the hill at Mill Creek, he spotted
a real estate agent putting a for-sale sign in the
ground on a hillside he’d always believed was special.

He waited for the agent to leave.

Then he took the sign.

“I didn’t want any competition.”

That hillside became one of Washington State’s most
remarkable estate vineyards — at 1,700 feet of elevation,
with overnight temperatures that drop 40 degrees
in a single summer night.

The wines don’t even carry the grape variety on
the label. Because at FIGGINS, the place is the product.

Full story linked in bio 🍷

07/23/2026

Every FIGGINS bottle starts with a decision, not a harvest.

Before the vines, before the label, before the wine in your glass: there was a son calling his father to say, “I want to be part of this.” That single phone call is why FIGGINS exists today. Not as a business plan, but as a family choosing, together, to keep the land and carry the legacy forward into a new generation.

This is what “family winery” actually means. Watch the full story to see how one call turned into three generations of wine.

Watch the full story on Spoken Wines (link in bio) 🍷

07/08/2026

At FIGGINS Estate, Chris Figgins believes the variety is only the lens. The real story is the place.
High above Walla Walla, at 1,700 feet, he found a hillside with deep loess soils, dramatic temperature swings, and a voice of its own. Every vineyard panel, every grape selection, every part of the underground winery was designed around one idea: let the land speak first.

To preserve that connection, Chris even carved a winery deep into the ancient basalt beneath the vineyard, allowing the wine to be crafted inside the very hillside that gives it its character.

In our newest Spoken Wines feature, Jan sits down with Chris on the very slope where it all began — to understand what “sense of place” really means when it is no longer a marketing phrase, but something you can taste in the glass.

Watch the full story here: https://youtu.be/GSGQuw2f1FE?is=2OhkkD60lOCs21rk

At 1,700 feet of elevation in Washington's Walla Walla Valley, with...

06/27/2026

He made the call his father was waiting for. Jan never did.

That’s the quiet center of our newest story — two sons of farmers, one vineyard at 1,700 feet, and a wine that doesn’t even put a grape name on the label because the place says everything the grape can’t.

Chris Figgins left architecture school, called his dad, and came home to plant vines on a hillside no one else knew was for sale. He stole the real estate sign out of the ground so no one else would find it. What he built in Walla Walla — underground caves carved through 15-million-year-old basalt, a vineyard that grows on top of the cellar, wines that never leave the property until they ship — is one of the most quietly extraordinary stories we’ve ever told.

Jan sat across from him at the top of that hillside, tasting the Estate Red and the Filia in the same place they were born, and heard something he’s still thinking about.

“You’re not just tasting wine. You’re tasting the site.”

Watch the full story. Link in bio.