KC’s top wine expert is opening a winery. But you’ll have to leave town to visit

Doug Frost still lives in Kansas City — among other things, he’s got a new granddaughter who lives about a mile away — but for the last several years, he’s been spending a lot of time in Walla Walla.

A longtime sommelier and wine consultant, Frost in 2018 partnered with another Kansas Citian, Brad Bergman, on a plan to start making their own vino out in the southeast corner of Washington state. They called it Echolands Winery.

“Basically what happened is that I was offered a piece of property in the Walla Walla Valley next to some pretty famous vineyards,” Frost said. “But (growing grapes) takes awhile — usually about three to five years for a crop to be ready to be turned into wine. We got our first crop in 2022. And now we’re about to have this thing where people can come see what we’ve been doing.”

Echolands Estate, the public-facing arm of the operation, will open April 3 in Walla Walla. The 27,000-square-foot building, which sits in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, includes a production facility, multiple tasting rooms and a visitor center.

“It’s a big space with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Blues,” Frost said. “I think it’s a really beautiful, stunning building that offers a cool take on the way wineries work. And we’re out on Mill Creek Road, where there’s a lot of exciting winery action happening right now. Walla Walla is pretty fun to visit — there’s more than 100 wineries, plus a surprisingly good food scene.”

Right now, Echolands is cranking out about 5,000 cases of wine a year — about 60,000 bottles. The wines include cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, grenache, grenache blanc and cinsaut.

“We make about 70% of our wine from our own grapes, and the other 30% comes from our neighbors,” Frost said.

In addition to his Washington obligations, Frost is out on the road a fair amount, consulting and educating on the topic of wine. (He holds both a Master of Wine and Master Sommelier certifications and used to write The Wine Press column in The Star.) But he also manages the beverage program at The Restaurant at 1900 and keeps tabs on the local wine scene, which he continues to trumpet.

“You go check out Barry (Tunnell) at Tannin or Jimmy (Frantze) at JJ’s, and those guys run very serious (wine) programs,” Frost said. “Very fun and different, nothing cookie-cutter about it. I sometimes have to defend Kansas City when I’m in other cities, but I still say this is a good wine town.”