Walla Walla, Washington is a wheat-and-onion town of roughly 35,000 people in the state's southeastern corner, closer to Boise than to Seattle.[1] It is also, improbably, one of the most recognized fine-wine names in the country -- mentioned in the same breath as Napa and Willamette by people who have never set foot in eastern Washington. That reputation is not old, and it is not accidental. It was built by a small number of named people, on a specific timeline, using a specific mechanism -- and the same town is now running a second, much smaller version of the identical mechanism in an entirely different industry.
Gary Figgins planted a few cuttings of cabernet sauvignon and riesling on his grandparents' Walla Walla property in 1974, working from skills an uncle had taught him making home wine from Concord grapes. He founded Leonetti Cellar and released his first cabernet vintage in 1978 -- one of the first wineries in the valley.[2]
On December 14, 1982, that 1978 Leonetti cabernet was named the best in the nation in a blind tasting of 68 wines -- 55 of them from California, every one already a gold-medal winner somewhere else. The result leaked to the local paper before the magazine that ran the tasting could publish it. Leonetti's cabernet went on the cover under the headline "The First American Wine Championship." It is still described as the most significant single wine ever made in Washington state -- the moment Washington red wine entered the national conversation at all.[3]
Figgins did not build the valley's reputation alone, and neither he nor the record treats it that way. Rick Small, who with his wife Darcey Fugman-Small had bonded Woodward Canyon -- only the second winery in the valley -- in 1981, spent 1983 with Figgins driving the valley in Small's 1967 pickup truck, marking out boundaries for a federal appellation. Darcey Fugman-Small, then still a Walla Walla County planner, wrote the actual application; Becky Hendricks of the original Seven Hills Vineyard prepared the maps. Small, as president of the Walla Walla Valley Winegrowers Association, submitted the petition. The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms approved the Walla Walla Valley American Viticultural Area on February 6, 1984 -- the nation's 59th AVA, and only the second in Washington state.[4]
Two acts, in sequence, are what actually built the identity: a single wine winning a real national blind tasting proved the valley could compete on quality, and a federal land designation -- pursued deliberately, on paper, by four named people -- turned that one proof point into a permanent, legally defined place-name the entire industry could build on afterward. Neither step happens without the other. A great wine with no appellation is a great bottle. An appellation with no great wine behind it is a boundary on a map nobody has reason to care about.
By 2023, the industry that single truck ride helped found had grown to roughly 158 licensed wineries in Walla Walla County alone, plus another ten just across the Oregon state line in Milton-Freewater -- inside the same AVA, since the appellation itself straddles Washington and Oregon.[5] The most recent economic impact study, covering 2023, found the industry generated $522 million in business sales and supported 2,865 jobs paying $146 million in labor income; wine tourism alone brought an estimated 573,000 visits and $167 million in visitor spending to a county of about 62,000 people.[6] A town nobody outside eastern Washington could place on a map forty years ago now pulls half a million wine-tourism visits a year on the strength of one federal appellation and the reputation that earned it.
Walla Walla is now home to a much smaller, much newer cluster chasing an entirely different opportunity, with an entirely different mechanism behind it: open-source mushroom cultivation.
Fungaia is a donation-based mushroom culture library and spawn laboratory, "homegrown in Walla Walla," built explicitly on what it calls open-source mycology -- the position that fungal genetics are a commons, available to anyone willing to spend the time maintaining them, not proprietary intellectual property to be licensed or sold exclusively. It supplies liquid cultures, spawn, and agar plates to home and commercial growers, and produces free instructional video curricula rather than charging for training.[7]
Chesed Farms is the commercial counterpart a few miles away. Sundown Hazen and Jonathan Garrett, who met at a church potluck, started the farm on roughly $5,000 in a garage, with no formal agricultural background between them -- Hazen's prior work was retail at Apple and logistics at UPS. They filed for permits four days before COVID-19 shutdowns began, and built the early business on bicycle deliveries of ten to thirty pounds of oyster mushrooms a week while Hazen worked nights stocking shelves at a grocery store. The farm has since grown from a 110-square-foot garage operation into a 4,000-square-foot greenhouse employing 13 people, generating roughly $200,000 a year, and now runs a winter farmers' market and a regional grower collaborative under the name "Persistent Local Food."[8][9]
The wine industry and the mycology cluster are not the same kind of thing, and naming the difference matters more than noting the coincidence that both happened in Walla Walla. Wine's generator was institutional and prestige-driven from the start: a blind competition judged by outside experts, followed by a federal designation process that exists specifically to convert terroir into a legally defensible, sellable place-name. It required an application, a government agency, and boundary lines drawn on an official map. The mycology cluster's generator is closer to the opposite: a donation-supported commons library that explicitly rejects licensing its genetics for exclusive profit, and a farm bootstrapped on $5,000 with no institutional backing of any kind. One mechanism runs through government recognition and scarcity value. The other runs through open access and shared genetics on purpose.
What they share is not the industry. It is the act itself -- a small number of specific, named people deciding a wheat town could also be something else, and doing the unglamorous procedural work (driving boundary lines in a pickup truck; filing farm permits four days before a pandemic shutdown) to make that bet durable rather than a passing enthusiasm. Whether the mycology cluster becomes Walla Walla's next real export is not yet answerable from the numbers -- Chesed Farms at $200,000 a year is not remotely Leonetti Cellar at the same age, let alone the $522 million industry wine eventually became. But the wine industry did not look like a durable export in 1974 either. It looked like a man planting cuttings from his grandparents' land. What made it durable was the deliberate act two people took nine years later to make the place-name permanent. Nobody has taken that equivalent step for Walla Walla mushrooms yet. The open question is whether anyone will.