Ashley Trout ʼ99: Crafting Wine with Passion and Purpose

Ashley Trout ʼ99 had grown fed up with restaurant servers routinely handing the wine list to men and inviting them to sample the first pour, particularly when women buy the most wine.

So Ashley, owner of Brook & Bull Cellars in Walla Walla, Washington, launched HoldtheMenu, a campaign to teach servers to consult women about their wine preferences—and to encourage female customers to confidently speak up. It’s not just a matter of changing male-centric norms, she said. It’s also good business.

“They’re not doing it maliciously—they’re just doing it traditionally,” Ashley said. “But if the tradition is no longer accurate, and it's a detriment to your financial success as a business, maybe that would be helpful to be aware of.”

Today, only about 20 percent of wineries in the nation are women-owned, making Ashley a notable exception in a male-dominated industry. Her journey into the wine business began during her freshman year of college and has since led to the creation of three wineries in the Walla Walla Valley. The largest is Brook & Bull, which produces 3,000 cases a year of malbec, cabernet franc, rosé, chardonnay, and red blends. Those who know Ashley best say she has made an indelible mark not just for the quality of her wines but for her unwavering commitment to using her platform as a force for social good. 

“We all know there's a need, and we can all talk about it,” said Alyson LaVarnway, Brook & Bull’s general manager. “But she’ll go out and do it.” 

Doing Good 

As with HoldtheMenu, Ashley uses her winemaking to uplift women. Brook & Bull sends its wines for “scoring” only to the three or so women wine critics in the U.S. Supporting women as tastemakers, she said, puts them in positions of power and influence. 

In 2016, after seeing too many migrant vineyard workers unable to get medical treatment, she started VITAL Wines, a nonprofit winery that raises money to help the workers and their families access health care.

“She’s done such a wonderful job of making the wine industry more inclusive,” said Maddie Richards, VITAL’s executive director. “...She takes her role in our community very seriously, which is probably why she felt compelled to start VITAL.” 

VITAL provides free eye exams and prescription eyeglasses to vineyard workers and their children and pays them for up to 10 days of “day-at-home pay,” akin to sick pay. Its Spanish-speaking advocates also connect workers to the local free health clinic, food bank and other services. Among the workers was a woman whose free mammogram detected breast cancer, allowing her to get early treatment.

Anthropology, Rhetoric, and Wine?

Winemaking never entered Ashley’s mind while growing up in Friendship Heights and attending GDS for kindergarten through 12th grade. But she said she has felt fueled by the high expectations of GDS teachers, such as Lukie Tannenbaum. It was Lukie, her seventh grade teacher, who first recognized that Ashley has ADHD.

“Lukie walked me through that,” Ashley said. “It was without taboo, but also it was without excuse…At no point did I feel lesser than, and there was no expectation that I was going to get worse grades as a result. It changed my life, knowing that about myself from such a young age and not having a taboo associated with it.”

Never feeling part of the East Coast’s “overachiever” crowd, Ashley said, she sought the “adventure” of attending college in the West, double-majoring in anthropology and rhetoric at  Whitman College in Walla Walla. 

In 1999, one week into her freshman year, she answered an ad for a part-time job at the local Reininger Winery mixing and agitating the fermentation bins to keep the grape juice properly oxygenated. 

“I thought, ‘That's not a real job—but that's exactly what I should be doing when I'm 18, and then when I grow up, I'll move to a big city and get a real job,’” she said. “It was almost the complete opposite of what I had grown up around.”

Every night around 10 p.m., Ashley worked alone in the winery’s fermentation room listening to the soothing jazz of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane amid the yeasty-sweet scent of fermenting wine.

Her job entailed getting oxygen to the yeast below the “cap” of deflated grapes that forms on the surface of the juice during the fermentation process.

Often, she perched atop the stainless steel bins, her legs in a triangle shape four feet apart as she balanced each foot on a two-inch rim on either side of the bin’s opening, hovering above the dark purple juice. Using a pole with a plate-shaped piece on the end, she did “punch-downs” by plunging the plate into the floating grapes to get oxygen to the yeast below.

Other times, depending on the stage of fermentation and the tannin structure that the winemaker sought, Ashley did “pump-overs.” That required standing beside the bins and using a hand-held pump to push the juice up and over the grapes–another way to mix and oxygenate the liquid.

She loved the physicality of the work—it felt like a tough triceps workout—and the warm, cozy feel of the fermentation room as the dark autumn nights grew colder outside. 

“It was sort of a soulful part of my day,” she recalled.

A “Defining Moment”

Ashley became so hooked that she adjusted her college class schedules and, at one point, took a semester off to work the fall grape harvest full-time. After college, she took a break from winemaking to live in Japan and study pottery, a hobby she’d discovered in Laura Tolliver’s GDS art class. She returned to Walla Walla after a rock climbing fall in Japan left her with a shattered jaw and broken hand, knee, and femur. 

While recovering, she missed the 2004 harvest and decided to devote her life to making wine.

“That was really the defining moment, where I looked around and everybody was doing the harvest but me,” Ashley said. “It felt really inappropriate, which was a little bit of a surprise, because if you’d have asked me at age 17, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would not have said ‘winemaker.’”

Over eight years, she alternated between working the March harvest in Argentina and the September harvest in Walla Walla, where she started her first winery, Flying Trout, at age 24. She sold Flying Trout six years later but stayed on as winemaker until she took time off after her second child was born.

“In many ways, that brand was my MBA,” she said. “I learned a lot of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of what it takes to run a business.”

Advice on Wine 

In 2016, Ashley started Brook & Bull, which makes wine from grapes provided by seven vineyards. She focuses on making wine less oaky and using grapes picked earlier in the season. 

Ashley and her husband, Brian Rudin, a winemaker at a rival winery, live in Walla Walla with their children, Alice and Raleigh. Wine, she said, is about the art of companionship, the kind nurtured over four-hour dinners that allow—and require—people to slow down. Her biggest wine lesson after more than two decades in the business: Don’t overthink it. 

“It doesn't need to be anything other than enjoyable,” Ashley said. “It doesn't need to be a bullying contest or a wallet-measuring contest. There's not a right answer or wrong answer.”

And no need, she says, to get anxious about pairing food with the correct wine.

“Some of the best wines I've ever had I had drinking out of a Solo cup with my best friend by a pool because I was with my best friend and the sun was shining,” Ashley said. “It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.”

Ashley’s wines can be purchased on the Brook & Bull website or at the following DC-area stores: Uncorked in Chevy Chase, MD; Whelan’s Beer & Wine in Potomac; The Organic Butcher in Bethesda; and Knowles Station Wine & Co. in Kensington.