Scott Greenberg: Blind tasting of Washington wines: Part 1, whites

For the last 50 years, the state of Washington has quietly but steadily been producing a bevy of tasty wines ranging from crisp, dry whites to spicy, bold reds and just about everything in between.

According to the Washington Wine Center’s website, the wine industry has been around in various incarnations since the first wine grapes were planted at Fort Vancouver by the Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1825. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when commercial wine grape planting took hold, that Washington began to attract national attention. The floodgates opened, and the resulting rapid expansion of the industry exploded in the mid-’70s.