Fitting home found for Prosser Wine Fair

The Prosser Wine and Food Fair has found new quarters after being given the boot from its home of 27 years just a few months before the annual festival

The venerable event, which celebrates the bounty of Prosser-area vineyards and wineries, will be held at Washington State University's ag research center near Prosser.

After allowing the event for almost three decades at the Art Fiker Stadium at Prosser High School, board officials decided to stop granting a waiver to allow alcohol to be served at the annual August festival.

And since you can't have a wine fair without wine, the festival become temporarily homeless.

Plans are in place for the festival to move to the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center upon its completion. But that's still a year or so away and school board members felt they couldn't allow the festival to go on for one more year at the stadium.

As anyone who plans events knows, finding a new home just a few months shy of the festival date is a challenge. It delays advertising materials and the ability to book vendors, among other things. It could even shake the public's confidence in the quality of the event.

But the folks who organize the Prosser Wine and Food Fair found a friend in WSU. It's a logical partnership, with the birth of the modern wine industry beginning at the research center at the hands of Walter Clore.

Clore spent 40 years there, working to convince farmers that wine grapes could become a winner crop in Eastern Washington. As we all now know, he was right.

Tribute will be paid to Clore's role in the wine industry and Prosser at the new wine and culinary center that is in the planning stages, and which will someday become the festival's permanent home.

Plans for the center have started and stalled over the years, but it has been given new life under a new board of directors. They have been seeking community input for the center, and expect to have infrastructure work begin in April and construction in the fall.

Prosser is a strong and parochial community, and we expected the wine fair would find a new home. Losing the long-term location was unfortunate, but something school leaders said was necessary to prevent sending the wrong message about alcohol to teens.

The WSU research center is the perfect interim facility, providing a different type of wine education by tying in the importance of agriculture and research to the development and history of Washington's wine industry.

That's something the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center will provide to visitors year-round upon its completion. And for one lovely Saturday in August it will have the extra attraction of the Prosser Wine and Food Fair.