Beer, Wine & Spirits in Spokane

Thirty years ago, the Mielke family shifted its trade from cherry packing to growing, harvesting, and aging the grapes at Arbor Crest Wine Cellars, which won CityVoter's award for Best Winery in 2011. The winery encompasses a warm-toned tasting room downtown and a 1924 Florentine-style estate perched on a cliff overlooking the Spokane River. The estate, registered as a National Historic Landmark, is home to a stone gazebo, 4 acres of gardens, and a gigantic checkers board for trees bored with feigning stillness. At each tasting room, knowledgeable oenophiles introduce palates to a selection of more than 15 handcrafted vintages taste and take home. In addition to fermenting wines from its own grapes, the Mielke family sources grapes from mature vineyards around Washington.

In 1982, Mike Conway walked away from more than a decade of large-scale wine production at E.&J. Gallo, Parducci, and Franzia Brothers to open Latah Creek Wine Cellars with his wife, Ellena. Today, with help from their daughter Natalie, they package more than 17,000 cases each year. The trio devotes much of their winemaking expertise to their most popular bottles, which include a riesling, Huckleberry L'Atah, and a chardonnay that Wine Press Northwest describes as "exotic and hedonistic." They develop each varietal with a minimal amount of processing and handling to keep flavors intact and prevent grapes from having reasons to make tell-all appearances on afternoon talk shows. The team can also swathe bottles in personalized wine labels for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays. The winery welcomes visitors to amble through its tiled walkways and arched courtyard, around the winemaking facilities, and into a gift shop teeming with trinkets and a well-stocked wine-tasting bar.

At Nectar Tasting Room, five local wineries—Anelare Winery, Hard Row to Hoe Vineyards, Northwest Cellars, Skylite Cellars, and Terra Blanca Winery—bring their award-winning pours to one downtown venue. To pair bites with sips, the tasting room’s wine experts and chefs collaborate on a menu of appetizers and desserts that accentuate the nuances of their 40-some wines. Within the 2,000-square-foot dining space, guests are greeted with the facility’s inner warmth brought on by a decor of hardwood floors, brick accents, and walls of windows. In addition to titillating guests' palates, the tasting room's team also organizes wine tours to explore Spokane's nearly 20 wineries and oversees several wine clubs that give members exclusive benefits, such as grapes autographed by each winery's master vintner.

Vintner Tim Nodland approaches blending his wines like arranging a song, which makes sense, because as a professional jazz musician he possesses an astute sense of creativity and balance. He describes his winery as being “more like a musician’s studio” and his wines as “liquid art.” Nodland's musical background inspires the names of wines such as "Bebop" and earned his winery a mention in Wine and Jazz magazine. Nodland Cellars produces only one red wine and one white wine every year, allowing the winery to focus all of its energy on refining each vintage. Nodland's meticulously selected grapes, sourced from quality Columbia Valley vineyards, are each handpicked before enjoying a gentle press in stainless steel. Each vintage, aged in 100% new french oak, uses a blend of six grapes, primarily made up of cabernet sauvignon and merlot, which recalls a classic bordeaux from the late 1700s or early 1800s. Nodland's private blend’s complex Old World flavor comes from rare carmenere grapes, which were wiped out in Europe by a phylloxera blight in the 1800s.

The Wine Shop, as the name cheekily suggests, specializes in providing numerous wines in an easygoing, friendly shopping arena. With a densely populated stock of over 3,000 domestic and imported wines, and nearly 1,000 of these bottles priced under $12, there's no shortage of affordable potables to pick from. The smartcard you receive with today's deal actually operates on three machines contained within the store. Not altogether different from old-timey soda fountains, these non-vengeful examples of automata read the amount of credit on your smartcard and allow you to select a glass of wine accordingly. With three machines on hand, each is stocked with a variety of wines curated directly from the stock on hand, containing eight reds and four whites at all times, at varying price ranges. Make your selection and receive a glass of up to 4 ounces from the polished machinery, which keeps wine fresh between pours. Depending on the wines you choose, you can use your card over more than one visit, or use the entire value in one card-swiping go.