I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Washington State as a wine region is incredibly unique in part because of ancient geography.

The Midwest was once a massive shallow waterway, heavily populated with algae, sea life,

ancient birds, and water dinosaurs.

It was also the home of the giant clam, the world's largest bivalve that grew to such size

because it needed bigger gills to survive in the muddy banks of this

Western interior seaway. When tectonic plate movement caused changes on the

western edges of the seaway, the waterway broke out from the Rocky Mountains

and partially drained into the Pacific Ocean through what is modern day Washington State.

In this great ancient flood, State.

In this great ancient flood, sea waters broke off huge chunks of the Rockies

and deposited them along their course.

They also carried boulders and smaller trace minerals the blanketed Washington State.

Predecessors of the horse roamed wild in this region, and when the floods came, the pre-horses ran to a higher ground to survive. Horse 7 Hills, AVA, is a major

hotbed for paleontologists studying fossils of the ancient horse. The unique hodgepodge geology coupled with the strata of many

synclines yield some of the most interesting soil chemistry in the world. Though long

gone the Western Interior Seaway still leaves its imprints upon our wines.

Washington State's wine industry really got its start back in the 1860s, but in a story familiar in many states

things wound down pretty fast with prohibition. Washington State was

pretty gung-ho about prohibition and was one of the first states to jump on the temperance

bandwagon.

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