(Wines&Vines) - Ste. Michelle Wine Estates is the biggest vintner in Washington state, a home-grown legend that’s won the right to dream big. Its partnership with Ernst Loosen helped make Washington state a notable source for premium domestic Riesling, with a 51.4% share of the market.

So when Ted Baseler stood up at the final luncheon of this year’s meeting of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers and announced that his winemakers had estimated that the state could grow to 200,000 acres of vineyard by 2040 (there’s about 60,000 acres right now), the bullish estimate grabbed attention.

The shock value wasn’t just because Baseler tagged that acreage as the source of grapes for premium wine production, posing a direct challenge to what he called 175,000 acres of premium wine grapes in California; it was because it takes a lot of water to make good wine. Or, as Mike Schwisow, director of government relations for WAWGG, told growers the previous day: Finding water is a challenge, and once you’ve found water, is it in the kind of place that yields grapes suitable for premium wine production?

“We don’t lack for sites,” he said. “We lack for stable water to bring those sites into production.” 

Water availability at a trickle

Many basins are closed to further appropriation of water rights, Schwisow explained, and even the water rights that have been allocated are under pressure from water flows, as growers in the Roza Irrigation District found out in 2015 when the district reduced allocations in view of the state’s worst drought in a decade.

While a number of initiatives are taking place to increase the availability of water and protect what does exist, WAWGG speakers pointed out that water isn’t a limitless resource in the high desert of Eastern Washington, let alone the high mountains that surround it.