(PasteMagazine) - Here are the tasting notes on the fair-trade pour-over coffee from Costa Rica that I’m drinking: “Bergamot; sunflower seed, organic green grapes.” I manage to order a cappuccino from the ironic-facial-hair grunge-meister barista without asking how you discern “organic” versus conventionally grown green grape in the flavor profile of a cup of freaking coffee. I mean, I could tell you if an actual green grape was a Thompson’s or a Perlette, but as far as whether it met organic cert standards, I’d be guessing. And that’s before you get to the part where we are talking about not actual grapes but coffee, which, let’s be fair, tastes overwhelmingly of… coffee.

Oh, I have a point, and it’s even about grapes.

I’m in Seattle. It’s March, which means Japanese cherries and star magnolias are running riot and it’s colder than a well-digger’s ass out here. The wind is piercing, the clouds are doing their best to look more mountainous than the mountains, and large branches are being ripped from cedar trees and flung at people as I write. I’ve just discovered there is a huge wine scene half an hour northeast of Seattle. I’m half wondering why I didn’t know that – being no stranger to wine or to the Northwest – and half wondering how. You can grow some amazing things in western Washington, and if wine could be made from rhododendrons or Japanese camellias or cedars this would be God’s Wine Country… but no way, no way could this climate produce a wine grape. Right?

Righty-o. A hundred wineries. Zero grapes.

Welcome to Washington, a land of mysteries, moonscapes, contradictions and conundrums. (But not Conundrum, that stuff’s entirely California’s karma.) Of course there are zillions of exceptions but the Napa / Sonoma wine industry grew in the tradition of French and Italian winemaking – Grow Your Own. Estate vineyards, proprietary fruit harvested right outside the doors and pressed, aged and bottled on site. Washington is different. Grapes do not generally fare well west of the Cascade Mountains (the Puget Sound AVA seems to be managing with a few varietals), but they find many attractive niches in the east – from the relatively cool and wet Walla Walla region to the arid sagebrush desert of the Columbia Valley and from the high-elevation ridges of Rattlesnake Valley to the cool river-fed niches of the Columbia Gorge. It is geologically diverse, has vast differences in weather from region to region and even from one side of a given AVA to the other, and is home to a large and rapidly growing expanse of vines – over 40 different varietals sprawling over more than 71,000 square miles. Washington is the second largest wine producing region in the US and, like many things in the Pacific Northwest, it’s an eccentric and fascinating scene that somewhat defies categorization.