From Bombs to Bottles: Andrew Latta’s Unlikely Home for Washington Wine

Stored in a WWII-era munitions bunker and shaped by Rhône philosophy, Latta Wines leans into altitude, acidity, and future-proof varietals to define a different vision of Washington wine.

The first thing you notice about Andrew Latta’s wine storage isn’t the temperature, it’s the history.

Latta Wines keeps bottles inside a former munitions bunker at the Walla Walla airport, part of a sprawling WWII-era bomber training base that still feels like a small city tucked behind guardhouses and barbed wire.

“It never held anything nuclear,” said Latta with a grin and a touch of gallows humor. “So our wines don’t glow.”

The bunker has all the military grade fixings. Steel doors, multiple feet of concrete, a grass-covered roof and sits at a constant 58 degrees year-round. It’s an unlikely but fitting home for a winery that has always operated a little outside Washington’s mainstream, leaning into Rhône varieties, uncommon whites and site-driven wines built for the future rather than fashion.

“I love Albariño, where is the sea?” Latta said laughing at my question about the age-old adage that the white wine needs an Ocean-front view to thrive. “A few millennia ago, this was a huge sea. That’s where that natural acidity comes from.”

Albariño has become a key piece of Latta’s white wine program, grown at elevated sites above 1,300 feet and fermented in concrete eggs to preserve minerality and tension. As Washington continues to warm, Latta is focused on grapes that can tolerate heat while holding acid.

“It’s been getting warmer,” Latta said. “You need grapes that can deal with that, not crazy, off-to-the-races sugar accumulation, but heart and acidity.”

Much of that fruit comes from the Royal Slope AVA, including Lawrence Vineyard, which spans multiple sites, elevations and microclimates. Latta works closely with Josh Lawrence, farming along ridgelines with thin soils, fractured basalt and constant airflow.