Month of Aug. 2026
Daughter and I decided to do some wine tasting. One reason is that I’ve been looking for a red and white to go with my cooking and with 250 wineries within a 50 mile radius of the Walla Walla valley, and 120 wineries in the valley, we had a lot to choose from. Yeah, I know that’s a lot of wineries!
Anyway, I’ve been passing a winery housed in an old school in Lowden just west of Walla Walla for years now but I’ve never stopped there. We decided to start our regular once every week or two tour of wineries there.
First stop after a 30 minute drive from home…L’Ecole winery. Very posh. Beautiful grounds.
And then we wander inside…this bar is upstairs but we wanted to get right to wine tasting.
Of course I’m conservative enough in my old age to only have a sip of each sample of wine. The menu isn’t a bar menu of food but it did have fancy almonds that we ordered as a pallet cleanser. Just the small ounce or two of almonds we ordered was $8, which was gifted to us after we bought some wines later.
After sampling several wines, I selected a couple to take home, than we toured the building. I decided on two wines to purchase and one of them was $85. I didn’t notice until we’d gotten home and I looked at the receipt. Champagne tastes on a beer budget. Oh, well.
There’s an outside veranda…
The wine bar is in one of the original classrooms with a library space…check out that old stove.
The grand staircase…beautiful restoration done here. This was a multi-year grade school, grades 1-6 for 59 years from 1915 to 1974. You can imagine how the wood work must have look before restoration. Especially the stairs with all those children running up and down all those years.
We were told that most of the woodwork in the building is original. Just look at that whatever this multi-door cabinet is called. Excellent restoration. Looks like it’s just a couple years old.
This room on the first floor was a class room but now a cafe’ of sorts.
I enjoyed touring the building as much as I liked the wine. The actual winery is up the hill a ways and this is just the tasting building and we didn’t go up there. The last picture is a sort of a cafe’ but we were saving appetites for later as our wine tasting tour progressed.
Next on the tour was the Waterbrook Tasting Room & Restaurant. Didn’t really notice that we’d missed the Woodward Canyon Winery which was just west on the same road the L’Ecole winery is on. Doh! Here’s a map of all three of them near each other.
Tasting room building…
Probably the winery itself? Has a nice pond for mosquito breeding.
Nice outside patio.
And we first ordered a flight of wines. And after tasting them all, decided they weren’t good enough to take home any bottles. But by now we were getting a bit hungry so ordered some food.
Daughter is a vegetarian so this here vegi meal. Large enough to take half home.
I ordered a BLT and asked for a spicy sauce and boy, was it unique and good. The sandwich was excellent! Too good because I ate the entire thing rather than take half home. You can see the little ‘flight’ glasses there with their wine offerings. I just had ice water to go with the meal.
And with that, headed on home. Our first wine tasting tour. Stumbled a bit and missed that other winery but maybe next week.
Thanks for reading!
Jim