Going Our Own Way (S) | part 1 of 3

Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, October 13, 2005

“Scott. Scott! Jack’s not in his crate!” I peered out the plane’s window, watching the rosy-faced baggage handlers toss an empty grey dog crate, OUR dog crate, JACK’s dog crate, up onto the conveyor belt right below me. Last time we saw Jack he was in that crate, when we checked him in in Dublin. That was over seven hours ago. We were in Frankfurt now, on this journey’s last leg home to Portland, Oregon.

“Let me see.” Scott leaned over me, craning his neck until his view found its way through the thick glass. The crate stood on the belt, rattling emptily in the wind. “Just stay cool,” he told me. “I’m going out there.”

We were on our way back from Ireland, coming home after Scott’s two-year work assignment, about to embark on a dream that had been growing in Scott since I had known him and probably way earlier: making wine. And not just any wine. Distinct wine. Wine with soul. Which meant growing and tending its vineyard, too. No “sourcing” from grape “warehouses” for us; we didn’t see the point of getting into the industry to be another label mining from the same veins of grapes, and we were not going to make it up as we went along, grabbing and blending what we could after the best were sold to the more established kingpins. No way would we want to enter that race. Instead, we had a grander vision—for the land, the grapes, the wine. We wanted it all to be proprietary, personal, and personalized. In short, unmistakably individual.

If our wine was going to be distinct, the land it grew from had better be, too; not just any vineyard or ground would do. It had to be THE perfect place, located and hand-picked based on a specific set of criteria Scott had been working on for a couple of years, crunching data like the PhD chemist he was trained as. If you could only see all the graphs and charts that guy would assemble, with all the required elements that would shape what we’d one day put in the bottle. Probably enough to wall paper our house.

It’s not just that Scott wanted to do it all, he wanted to do it full time. And I was fine with that. This would be no hobby, but a family farm, and we would work it together, even though the closest farming I had ever done was, hmmmm. Really nothing, I guess. I always spoke of the dairy farms surrounding my upstate New York hometown, but that didn’t qualify for much. Hell, I didn’t even go out and cow-tip in my youth, something supposedly people did (poor cows), at least the college students who invaded our area each year. But I loved the farming idea. Back to the earth, a simpler living. Yes, sign me up!

As for Scott, he had been a farm kid in Kansas, and now that childhood nostalgia of land and its bounty had become blended into his adult life with his love of wine. Ever since his grad school days at Cornell University some 20 years ago, Scott developed a wine nose and followed it: to France on a post-doc position where he was befriended by one of France’s most noted wine merchants who every weekend taught him the nuances of finer wines; another post-doc position landed him at Berkeley, with Napa right at his doorstep; as a national scientist at the National Energy Lab in Washington he found himself at the foot of Red Mountain when the chateau was just being built on the hill. And then in Portland, with Willamette Valley a stone’s throw away. Our stay in Ireland further gave us opportunity to do more continental traveling and wine exploring, and on those trips it was with an eye to the future and on our own wines we excitedly talked about making.

I did mention Scott wanted to do it all, yes? But did I tell you how he wanted to do it all FROM SCRATCH? Bare ground, people. And in an “undiscovered” location. With all that vineyard criteria, naturally. Ultimately, it was what we needed to do because it was the only way, Scott said, that we could afford it, the only way we could make it happen. We didn’t have the cash to take over an existing vineyard, didn’t have an old family empire we could draw from, hadn’t won lotto, didn’t have any spectacular divorce settlement from previous marriages, weren’t drawing from any retirement savings. No, back then we were in our late 30s and starting from essentially nothing. All we really had to fall back on was Scott’s intense desire and exuberance to make wine —coupled with his budget-minded ways—tempered by my undying pessimism and fear, that thankfully, through the days and months that were to follow, ever so slowly became taken over by belief: we could do this. We had to do this. We would find a way to do this.

TO BE CONTINUED.