Unique Washington Wine Experience

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Since its opening in June of this year the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center in Prosser has had more than 2300 visitors stop by to experience the Clore Center's unique blend of wine tasting, agriculture history telling, and exhibits. April Reddout, the Clore Center's tasting room manager says that they expect the number of visitors they see every month to continue to grow as word gets out about what the Center has to offer.

REDDOUT: We're thrilled that our mission and our model of what we intended to do, to be able to promote Washington wineries to our visitors, is working. People are coming in, enjoying a bottle from a winery that they hadn't heard of before, and they're going to that winery, buying more, and saying that the Clore Center exposed them to that winery; they're joining the wine clubs, they're getting involved with these wineries that they would have not maybe come across or hadn't discovered yet. We're getting the feedback from the wineries that we've worked with so far that our mission is working, and it's very exciting to us.

The culinary side of the Clore Center has been very busy as well offering a variety of classes where attendees are shown how to make various food items and what wines will pair nicely with them. Most recently they had their "Thanksgiving Sequel" where cooking experts demonstrated some creative ways to use turkey day leftovers, paired with wines from the Horse Heaven Hills AVA. This Thanksgiving weekend the Clore Center will be open Friday through Sunday from 11:00 to 5:00 pm and will feature seasonal soups by Chef Kristen and wine sampling from Horse Heaven Hills. For more information on the Clore Center and upcoming events be sure to visit www.theclorecenter.org.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.