- Hello.

I'm your host Staci Nelson and welcome to a new episode of Everyday Northwest.

And a Happy New Year as well.

We're looking forward to yet another year of bringing you the very best arts and culture that Pacific Northwest has to offer, from the famous to the yet to be famous.

Speaking of famous, our first story today is the Chihuly Garden and Glass in downtown Seattle.

Dale Chihuly's art is known around the world and is a must see when in Seattle.

Enjoy the experience of the imaginative and colorful world of Chihuly Garden and Glass.

Our next feature is the Pixan Restaurant in White Salmon, Washington.

Pixan is not your typical Mexican restaurant fair.

Get ready to feast your eyes and ready your taste buds for the fusion of Pixan.

Our final feature gives focus to the excellence of Washington Wineries.

Learn the history, the science and the sustainable approach to Echolands Winery.

So sit back for the next 30 minutes and enjoy the sights, sounds, eats, beats and flavors of the Pacific Northwest from the pages of Art Chowder magazine.

(upbeat music) (calm music) (calm music) - Hi, my name is Michelle Bufano and I'm the Executive Director here at Chihuly Garden and Glass.

And I've been here since the very first day we opened our doors to the public.

I get the wonderful pleasure of leading this team here every single day.

(calm music) (calm music) We are really fortunate to have hundreds of thousands of people come visit us from all over the world.

Some people are seeing glass for the first time in their lives and some people have been following Dale Chihuly all over the world, from Hawaii to London to wherever they've seen an exhibition of his.

And what's really magical about it is that we get to see people experiencing his, this exhibition and their curiosity and wonder that they feel when they're seeing it for the first time.

(calm music) (calm music) (calm music) Although we're celebrating our 10th anniversary at Chihuly Garden Glass, the idea of creating Chihuly Garden and Glass started long before that time.

The Wright family who owns and operates the Space Needle long had a relationship with Dale Chihuly and wanted to find some way to do a partnership with the Space Needle.

So they were in conversations with Chihuly for quite a while when a request for proposal came out for this building that we're standing in today.

And so the Wright family asked Dale Chihuly if he would participate in this venture and that's when the real magic started happening.

So they started conversations for several years about what this project could be.

And then we opened our doors on May 21st, 2012.

(calm music) (calm music) We have eight interior galleries and each gallery has a different installation of Dale Chihuly's work.

Then once you walk out of the last gallery, you enter into our signature space, which is the glasshouse.

Inside the glasshouse, you will see a, one of the largest hanging chandeliers that Chihuly's ever created.

And after that, you wander into our beautiful garden which is this great space where the plants and the art speak to each other.

And we have four signature towers in the garden along with several of his different series that he's created throughout his career.

(calm music) (calm music) (calm music) (upbeat music) Several years after we opened Chihuly Garden and Glass, we started a partnership with Seattle Public Schools about the science of glass.

And very quickly we realized that the best way to describe the science of glass was to actually show the students.

So we built this beautiful hot shop inside a 1967 Airstream and we opened for our public and absolutely hands down, it's one of the favorite experiences while you're here on site.

So every year we have the hot shop arrive in the fall and it stays until the summer and then it is mobile, so it leaves our property.

But during that winter period, we have guests packed around this space trying to see our incredible team of glass blowers doing a demonstration.

- We're gonna start by going into the furnace here and grabbing just a little bit of glass.

That's what's called a gather on the end of the glass there.

And notice that it's very orange and hot.

Wants to go with gravity, Paul were to stop turning his pipe, it would go down to the ground.

Paul's just gonna take a little bit of time to shape up the glass.

We're going to get onto our first step for making a piece which is putting a bubble into that gather.

(upbeat music) And we're gonna go right into our next layer of glass which is some crushed up colored glass that Paul has on the table there.

It's called frits, spelled f-r-i-t. (upbeat music) That's all melted.

We're gonna put some red.

Fire red frit on there.

(upbeat music) Now we're gonna begin the process of inflating and stretching out the piece.

Paul's gonna use gravity and turn the pipe around to stretch the piece out.

(upbeat music) Paul's gonna use those tweezers to pull out that excess glass and we're gonna start to use some shears to trim the lips so it's nice and thin.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - We do about five to six demonstrations a day and our audience just loves the team here.

And they also love what we create in the hot shop.

So this is called the Community Hot Shop because every single piece of glass that we make here in the hot shop is sold and then all of the proceeds go to support glass arts in the city of Seattle.

(upbeat music) Although the indoor galleries don't change or rotate, we are really fortunate that this November, we launched a brand new installation called Winter Brilliance.

It is all white and primarily icicle based installation with towers and chandeliers and reeds.

And during the holiday season, our visitors get an amazing experience.

It is a light and sound experience that includes video mapping or projection of light choreographed with the beautiful music composed by Brian Eno.

And it only runs for the holidays so you have to come and see it.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (bright music) (upbeat music) - I started cooking from a really young age.

Probably as soon as I could reach the stove.

Making my mom food any chance I could.

It was kind of a point of pride for me.

So I just naturally gravitated towards the industry.

I traveled to New York, lived there and cooked there for a (indistinct) and came back to California and started a food truck business (upbeat music) and did that for a number of years and eventually decided that I'd rather be in a brick and mortar establishment.

Brick and mortar appealed to me.

The team that I had assembled were ready to make a purchase on something.

And I knew a gentleman here in White Salmon that owned this restaurant who had joked about it often that I would've, that I should come and buy one of his restaurants.

And so I just had in the back of my mind and I called him up and I was like, hey, you still joking (laughs) or what, you know?

It just worked out.

Kind of just came up here on a whim and here we are.

And it's funny 'cause he asked me what I was, he's like, well, what are you gonna do as far as food?

What are you gonna cook?

My forte would be I guess like Pan-Asian and French and European stuff.

Coincidentally at the same time, I had just been exposed to the food of Yucatan and Southern Mexico which was completely different than what I had grown up eating which was Northern Mexican food and yeah.

Totally different cuisine, totally different ingredients.

So it was like a whole new world and really, Yucatecan and more Mayan inspired foods or derived foods have, I have, I feel like they have a little bit more cultural diversity.

I think it's because partly the geography and the way the peninsula sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was pretty much the first landing spot for anybody that came across the Atlantic.

And it was actually thought to be an island for hundreds of years by explorers 'cause it's so large.

So you have, you know, every, pretty much every influence of European food, Italian, Portuguese, French and then you have some Dutch cuisine from Dutch pirates that would land there.

So yeah, it's a very diverse culinary landscape and I think it appealed to me because it's like anything goes, it feels like.

And that's kind of, you know, that's something that really speaks to me.

It's like I have complete creative freedom at that point.

And so I've taken the liberty of, in doing the food here, of throwing in things that were just like, you would not find in Mexican food.

We use some Korean ingredients, we use, you know, a lot of things that you just wouldn't find.

So it's been really fun.

- I'm obsessed with the White Salmon community.

I think the people here are wonderful.

There's tons of families and we have so many regulars that come in as well.

So it, they come, they slowly become pieces of our family as well.

It's just a very down to earth place.

I feel very valued working here and I love being behind the bar where it can be all of the residents of White Salmon and we get decent amount of tourism as well from Portland.

So it's really fun to get both the locals and the people visiting here who are so excited about the food.

- And so I got my wheels, my wheels turning once I realized okay, maybe I could do Yucatecan or you know, more Southern Mexican food.

And I came, I just started researching and I was just like, I gotta find the perfect name.

I mean, you know, kind of just ride this wave of inspiration.

And I stumbled across Hanal Pixan which is the Mayan Day of the Dead.

And so originally the name was Hanal Pixan and I was, and then I came to the conclusion that it was too wordy.

And so, and then I just, yeah, broke it down to just Pixan and what that means is just soul or spirit.

As far as the restaurant goes though, I mean, you know, it's kind of an embodiment of who I am.

I try to make, you know, keep it kind of light and you know, kind of fun and you know, kind of rough around the edges.

But really when you get down to it, it's, you know, we're doing serious food here and we're, we have high standards for what we do and we wanna be you know, considered in the conversation of you know, one of the best restaurants.

And so I take some of the, you know, the practices and some of the techniques that I learned in, you know, classic French cooking and apply it to Mexican food.

So it's a little different, it's fusion.

But I think that's the whole nature of Yucatecan food and Mexican food as a whole.

It really is just fusion food.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (sentimental music) - So Echolands was begun in 2017.

It was begun with a land purchase.

Basically my business partner and I, Brad Bergman had found a piece of property that the great Norm McKibben was willing to make available to us.

And it was in the Southern part of the Walla Walla Valley in what's called the SeVein Water Project.

Comes with water, you see, very important when you're in places like Walla Walla Valley which really requires irrigation if you're gonna make things happen.

And so we bought a piece of land, we spent about a year and a half just prepping the soil and then planted actually vineyard there, about 25 acres of vineyard there in 2019.

We got our first crop this year.

And so just this past year in 22, we were able to make some grapes, some wine from our grapes there.

And we'll have those wines, some of them, the white wines will come out later on in 23.

The project began because I'm an enthusiast to the Walla Walla Valley.

I've been coming up there since the 80s.

I've been in love with the wines there since the 80s and believed that maybe there was a style of wine that we could make there that we could bring to bear that wasn't necessarily part of what Walla Walla Valley was doing already.

We were trying to make wines that show a little more elegance, maybe a little more nuance.

I think basically you can put in parentheses wines of lower alcohol.

Wines of slightly higher acidity.

Those are wines that I prefer to drink and that I think are maybe more appropriate to food.

They're just more my style.

You know, at the end of the day, when you start a winery, you probably better like the wine you make 'cause you may have to drink it all, you know?

Nobody else may pony up.

So we make about 5,000 cases or so.

So we're, you know, not a tiny winery any longer and have just finished our fifth harvest because even though we didn't have grapes that we could work from that were from our own vines until this year, until 22, we actually have been buying grapes from our neighbors in Walla Walla Valley and making wine from those since the 2018 harvest.

Our winemaker is a guy named Taylor Oswald.

Taylor, we poached from another winery.

He was the analogist, basically the guy who, you know, the scientist, if you will, behind the wines.

You know, from my background being a master of sommelier and being a master of wine and all that stuff, I certainly feel confident in my own view of the aesthetics of wine.

I certainly feel comfortable having spent 40 years of my life in the wine trade.

I'm comfortable with the sales and the, even the marketing of wine but I know what I don't know.

And the chemistry of wine is something that is not for fools or idiots like me to fuss around with.

I am somebody who can taste wine and tell you a great deal about it.

But at the end of the day, wine has to be a stable beverage.

It has to be an appropriately made beverage and you need a scientist to do that.

And Taylor Oswald is a skilled wine maker.

Maybe even more importantly, he likes the same style of wines that I like.

He's willing to try to make those kinds of wines.

Wines that are a little more nuanced that have slightly lower alcohols that maybe don't show as much new oak as some of the big bomb wines out there.

I'm just not into those big bomber wines anymore.

I mean, I'm not putting down Napa Valley.

There are plenty of people who make wines like those in Napa Valley, but you know what?

I'm not in Napa Valley.

We're in Walla Walla Valley.

I think we should try to make wines that have our own idiosyncratic characteristics.

I mean that's how I view the whole thing.

And so we try to make wines that reflect our place but yeah, agree.

They, we also make wines that reflect our style.

- My background in the wine industry was first in retail.

I worked at a shop called ESQUE in Seattle from 2008 to 2010.

At that point, I decided to move to Walla Walla and work my first harvest at Rotie Cellars and then the 11 Harvest at Gramercy Cellars.

At that point, I decided that getting a master's degree in winemaking would be a good idea.

So I decided to go to WSU in their food and wine program that focused on viticulture analogy.

And then after that, I worked at Mark Ryan for four years as their analogist.

And then Doug talked to me in 2017 about coming on here and joining the team.

- We make some other wines.

We make Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon blend, white grapes.

And our very first wine is in, you know, gonna be in the bottle soon of that Sauvignon Blanc in Semillon blend.

It's from our own grapevine.

So this is the very first harvest from it from Taggart Vineyard named after my grandfather who's from the area, born in, well, grew up in Wenatchee, born actually in the Midwest but grew up in Wenatchee virtually his whole life.

My mom's from Tacoma.

I was born in Portland, Oregon, yada yada, you know, so Taggart, my grandfather's name, my mother's maiden name.

It seemed really important to me to plant that name on that vineyard because they're the reason why I'm in that area and why I'm trying to make wine there.

And so our very first grapes have come off Taggart in September and October of 22.

And some of those wines will be out like that Sauvignon Blanc Sémillon blend.

Grenache Rosé, once again, a Rosé from a red grape but we make ours really pale and crisp and tangy.

You know, it's just the kind of stuff that I think is fun to make.

We even make a Pet Nat which is a sparkling wine made without any sulfur at all.

And it's fun to make as well because I think it's a valid style of wine.

It, ours is very clean.

We disgorge it with the help of Matt Austin at Grow Grain Vineyard and so yeah.

That's a fun style to make too.

But our, you know, kind of real meaning in life are these Bordeaux style blends or these blends based on Cabernet Sauvignon, Cera and then we mess around with other grapes like Grenache and such.

- This space here, we started working on in the first half of 2021.

During the pandemic, we weren't sure if we would need a tasting room as we had planned on building our own winery and facility but we realized that having a space to show our wines and show kind of who we are would be a good idea.

And we thought downtown Walla Walla would be a good location for that.

So we began work, as I said, in the first part of 2021 and opened up in the first part of 2022.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - That is our show for today.

We thank you for allowing us to share a bit of what makes our great Pacific Northwest special.

We hope to see you again soon as we bring you everyday Northwest and Art Chowder Magazine.

- [Narrator] Learn more about the sight, sounds, beats and treats of life in the Pacific Northwest through Art Chowder magazine.

Subscriptions and more information are available at www.artchowder.com.

Funding for Everyday Northwest provided in part by BECU.

People helping people.

www.becu.org.

Also, Historic Flight Foundation at Felts Field in Spokane.

Experience history in motion.

www.HistoricFlight.org.

And Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

The MAC, www.NorthwestMuseum.org.

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