Turning Wine into Gold
From Mattawa to Maine, graduates of the Walla Walla Community College enology and viticulture program have been proving themselves to be golden.
From Mattawa to Maine, graduates of the Walla Walla Community College enology and viticulture program have been proving themselves to be golden.
To city dwellers, cowboys seem like an exotic, vanishing breed. And farriers? Try asking a few folks what farriers do, and you’ll be amazed at how many blank looks you get in return.
The first international students arrived at WWCC in 1978. In that year Charles Cottingham was the Director of Admissions and Registrar. As he remembers it, “Our college president, Pete Dietrich, wanted to increase diversity at the school, and told me ‘We need to recruit some international students to give our students, who are mostly Caucasian, an idea of another way of life.’”
There’s serious business and there’s monkey business. Sometimes the two overlap and intertwine. In 1978 Walla Walla Community College got serious about business, opening its Center for Management Development, then launching the Small Business Management Program in 1979.
We say there’s no place like home, that home is where the heart is. But sometimes what feels like home isn’t where you expect it to be.
At WWCC it’s the Arts and Sciences program that prepares students to transfer to a baccalaureate institution. About one third of the college’s students are enrolled in this program.
Walla Walla has many sources of pride, but this year our community college rises to the top of the list. September 19 is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the school that the Aspen Institute named one of the best community colleges in the nation.
It may seem like a long leap from solar panels and wind turbines to potato products and aluminum boats, but it’s all within the scope of the Energy Systems Technology program at Walla Walla Community College.
When you first meet Oscar Morales, even though English is his native tongue, he immediately begins speaking the language he loves best, saying things like “Japanese Arista right hand drive SC300 2JZDTE” and “R35 GRTR.” It’s the secret language of cars.
Last summer, the college’s enology and viticulture program hired Joel Perez as its new Director of Viticulture. This month he was named one of Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 Tastemakers for 2017, an annual award recognizing the most influential members of the wine industry’s next generation.
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