WALLA WALLA, Wash. — Within her first week of moving to the Walla Walla Valley in 1999, Ashley Trout got herself a job. She traded the Washington of politicos for the Washington of westward-wandering pioneers to attend Whitman College.
She double majored in Anthropology and Rhetoric. Upon arrival, wine seemed like as good an idea as any.
“When in Rome,” she says about taking a job doing nighttime punch downs at Reininger Winery. “It’s what 18-year-olds are for.”
The ups and downs of harvest, the urgency and physicality of those repetitive tasks are not for everyone — but Ashley thrived within the somewhat narrow space of overnight wine work, getting a taste for a life that could be.
“Which then, of course, led into everything,” she says.
By her sophomore year, Ashley took a break from her fall semester so she could be fully immersed in harvest.
“I was seeing a snapshot each night of this moving entity, but I wasn’t seeing how it was moving throughout the day,” she says. “So I wanted to see the rest of it, and the rest is history.”
Working with a small crew at Reininger (three people, including Ashley) allowed her to test and master different elements of the craft.
“There’s a modesty that comes with it, a humility on all our parts. I came in on what was their third vintage, and so all three of us were like, ‘Here we go!’
After a climbing accident left her unable to work harvest in 2005, Ashley began to come to terms with the idea that perhaps wine wasn’t just a job to have in college.
“I was looking around at everyone else doing harvest, and I couldn’t do it with them, and that seemed really inappropriate.” The frenetic and intoxicating energy of harvest was something she didn’t want to be without. “I had no idea it had gotten to that point, it was a huge surprise to me.”
To recoup some of the experience she missed while she was convalescing, she made her way to Mendoza, Argentina. She secured a harvest internship through a friend of a friend, but when she arrived, that internship did not exist.
“He was like, ‘You showed up! I was just being polite. I don’t have anything for you.”
While making friends and lamenting about her predicament as she hung around her hostel, Ashley talked herself into a job at Bodega Alta Vista by way of the hostel owner’s father, who was a wine educator for the master’s program at Universidad de Mendoza.
“It’s a big city, but within the wine portion, everybody knows everybody. And that led to eight harvests,” she says.
While flying back and forth from Washington to Mendoza, Ashley started her own winery in 2006 — Flying Trout, the name a nod to the fact that she was zooming between two hemispheres, soaking up as much experience and knowledge as life would allow. She sold that brand in 2010, but stayed on as winemaker until 2015, taking a bit of time off in the interim when her second child was born.
By 2016, she shifted her focus to a project she felt compelled to bring to reality from the start: Vital Wines. She also created a sister brand, Brook & Bull, another reference to her surname.
Vital Wines is a non-profit winery that strives to improve equity in access to healthcare for vineyard workers and their families. It’s a need Ashley felt the moment she began her first harvest.
Growing up in a bilingual, bicultural household allowed Ashley to plainly see the trajectory of the industry, and the hole of accessible care that would widen as a result.
“It might be fine if it’s just eight wineries, but it’s not fine if you’ve got a multi-billion dollar statewide industry resting on the backs of people whose basic needs aren’t being met,” she points out.
An endeavor such as Vital Wines takes an enormous amount of thought, planning, organization and quite a bit of skill. And it wasn’t something that Ashley felt she could wait on.
“My brother-in-law was in an MBA program and said something about the power of company culture, about how it is literally impossible to change once it’s set,” Ashley says. “When I think of the company culture of Washington wine, I don’t think about individual wineries, but of the valley, of the entire state. And I wanted to make sure we were a part of the culture setting, that we were sewn in from the very beginning.”
So without an example to follow, Trout created Vital Wines.
“I’m not an advocate of building the plane while you’re flying it, but I can’t not,” she says. “There wasn’t anybody who was going to give me the trade secrets on how to run a non-profit winery. There is no manual for that.”
While Vital Wines is a project that speaks to her heart and intent, Brook & Bull is her day job. A winery that bases itself around untraditional blends and hard-to-find varietals with lower oak profiles, Brook & Bull strives to make wines that are just as lovely inside the bottle as the striking black and white label featured on the front.
“Seventy percent of wines purchased in the nation are purchased by women,” she points out. “Women don’t have a problem with luxury. Scores aren’t what they’re looking for, it’s beauty. What I aim to do at Brook & Bull is have a beautiful tasting room, with beautiful labels and beautiful wine … beautiful vineyards.
“I’d love for Brook & Bull to be, ‘How do we infuse something gorgeous into what could have otherwise been a mundane Tuesday night?’ ” she adds.
That path to the beauty Brook & Bull offers, to the hope and opportunity pushed forth by Vital Wines was laid long ago, just up the valley.
“It was probably my third or fourth harvest. We had just finished pressure washing the crush pad — it was me, Chuck (Reininger) and Raul (Morfin) and a ’99 Reininger Cab Franc.
“It was this overarching notion of, you’re physically exhausted, and you’re here with your friends, and you’ve created something,” she recalls. “You have this absolute work of art that you can enjoy as the day winds down, and how beautiful is it that we can incorporate art into this moment of accomplishment, this moment with friends? It was such a multi- layered thing.”
And that Cabernet Franc proved to be a turning point for Trout, who assists vineyard workers through Vital Wines and elevates weeknights for people via Brook & Bull.
“That’s when I thought, ‘This is why people drink beautiful wines,’ ” she says. “And it wasn’t an expensive bottle. We were just dripping wet, covered in dirt. In overalls and boots. And yet you could sneak in this almost clandestine, this luxury piece. It just felt perfect.”
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