"He's Nascar and I'm Formula One," Kyle MacLachlan was saying on a crisp morning last November in Walla Walla, Washington, "and never the twain shall meet!" He was referring to his collaboration with the friend he'd come to visit, winemaker Eric Dunham, and the chipper proclamation — slightly bent, delivered with Swiss-watch timing, and poking gentle fun — was vintage MacLachlan. It wasn't hard to imagine it coming from one of the 49-year-old actor's indelible on-screen alter egos: Trey MacDougal, the tartan-boxered mama's boy in Sex and the City; Orson Hodge, the possibly murderous dentist in Desperate Housewives; or, perhaps most of all, Dale Cooper, the schoolboyish FBI agent with a thing for cherry pie, black coffee, and Tibetan mysticism in David Lynch's Twin Peaks.

But whereas Coop found himself dispatched to an eccentric, out-of-the-way Pacific Northwest town to solve the most out-there murder mystery in the history of prime time, MacLachlan had come to Walla Walla on a much happier assignment: the very first bottling of Pursued by Bear, a Bordeaux-inspired Cabernet Sauvignon blend that he and Dunham have partnered up to create from grapes mostly grown on Red Mountain, a tiny appellation halfway between Walla Walla and MacLachlan's hometown of Yakima.

"It's a great way for me to reconnect with home," MacLachlan said of the project, looking on as the roughly 280 cases of the 2005 vintage clanked their way through a maze of machinery (unscrambling table, nitrogen sparger, labeler) at Dunham Cellars, the top-notch winery that Dunham, along with his father and stepmother, established in 1999 in a World War II-era hangar near Walla Walla's tiny airport. Indeed, the event felt like a family affair: With the Stones cranking on the in-house P.A., workers tossed tennis balls to the winery's various canine mascots (Dunham's running buddy is a three-legged, 13-year-old Border collie named Port) while MacLachlan's father, Kent, took it all in. "It's a historic day," he observed, impishly turning his stockbroker's tabulating gaze upon the steady parade of bottles: "Sixty-two-fifty, sixty-two-fifty, sixty-two-fifty?" (The final price has not been set.)

For MacLachlan, whom Lynch famously turned on to the joys of Bordeaux during the filming of Dune, and whose home cellar in Los Angeles contains upward of 800 bottles, the effort represents the kind of leap every armchair connoisseur fantasizes about, from the sidelines into the game. He also seems right at home in Walla Walla, happily playing Agent Cooper to Dunham's Sheriff Truman in this farm town of 30,000 once known only for sweet onions, winter wheat, and the state penitentiary, but which is now arguably the most surging wine-growing center in North America. When Dunham — a former Navy guy whose 2002 Syrah was pronounced the best in the United States by The Wall Street Journal — started cranking out his first vintages here in the mid-nineties, there were a mere handful of wineries. Now there are more than 100. But despite all the quality juice flowing here from such makers as Leonetti, Woodward Canyon, K Vintners, Buty, L'Ecole No. 41, and Cayuse, Walla Walla proudly remains the un-Napa, more Carhartt than Cartier.