Royal Slope is the newest American Viticultural Area (AVA) in Washington State. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau (TTB) published the final rule for Royal Slope today, Sept. 2, 2020, to officially define it as a designated wine grape-growing region.
“Many of our wineries and grape growers have been championing the terroir of Royal Slope for a long time, so it’s thrilling for them to be able to put an official AVA name on the bottle,” said Steve Warner, president of the Washington State Wine Commission.
The Royal Slope AVA is a total 156,389 acres, wholly within the Columbia Valley AVA. It is located just to the south of the Ancient Lakes AVA, and to the north of the Wahluke Slope AVA. The area encompasses Frenchman Hills, a 30-mile long east-west trending ridge with a gentle to medium-steep south-facing slope. There are more than 1,900 acres of wine grapes currently planted within the AVA, producing more than 20 varieties. The majority of the area’s soils are formed of windblown silts or ‘loess.’
“The AVA is something of an island geographically that is surrounded on all four sides by very different lands,” explained Alan Busacca, PhD, who co-wrote the AVA petition with Richard Rupp, PhD. “North of the AVA are generally flat lands of the Quincy Valley with soils on shifting dune sands. To the east and south of the AVA, the landscape falls away into the harsh, basalt bedrock-dominated cliffs of Crab Creek Coulee gouged out by Missoula Floods, and on the west, the bedrock cliffs fall away steeply to the Columbia River.”