The Hardest Part

You’d think it’d be the waiting. All this waiting. At first it was to find the right land. Then it was to do the dance so the wheat farmer (Old Wise All) would sell us it. Which did turn out shorter than expected, but a dance and wait game nonetheless. The wait to find water. How deep would we have to drill? How much would there be? Would we even find any? Then the waiting for the deer fence to be dug, the mainline to be set in, the 3-phase to be brought in, the plants to arrive.

And then after we planted, the waiting for those babies to grow. Then when weather plays a role, there’s that waiting. Have the young vines hardened off enough so that they’re ready for the season’s first frost? Or the waiting once we thought our entire vineyard had been frozen by an unexpected deep freeze that was supposed to be just a predicted frost. For two days in a row. The wait to see, was the vineyard dead? Then the waiting that same year (our first farming year) to see if your vineyard manager was going to make it, rushed into the hospital for open-heart surgery, one of the most fit 70-some year olds I have ever met in the USA. He did. And our vineyard wasn’t frozen, but the wait was crazy, none-the-less.

And then the wait for Big Fish, let’s call him Ol’ WAll-eyed Pike, a big name in the wine industry who was thinking of buying property near ours, and if he did how our area would quickly become elevated in stature, and price. Oh, was that a wait. And then when we realized we had forgotten somehow to close our land deal and how we had to wait because suddenly we had Old Wise All’s lawyer telling us that our initial agreement may not even hold up and then there was even a new price tag (higher, of course) attached to their documents. Call that a crazy wait, all that back and forth to close THAT deal.

Then the wait for the berries to ripen. The weather wait again. The wait for the birds; how much can those suckers eat? A LOT, we found out, so fixed that problem for the next year. And the wait of course for the wine. Will it turn out? Will all we did for it in the vineyard, how it was pruned and trellised and looked after and then was picked at that optimum sugar and acid balance, will it be the wine we want it to be? And every year it new waiting. Maybe for the same stuff. But new and different because we’re hanging out here on this limb with this endeavor. Just the two and one-half (that’s Sam) of us.

But believe-it-or-not, the hardest part is NOT the waiting, it’s not being out there. It’s not being on site, next door to our dream, but working it from a distance. It sucks it out of us, it does. The drive. The headache, the heartache, to watch from a distance and feel absolutely powerless, which even if we are, it all is magnified at a distance. The stuff Scott has to take care of that ordinarily can be done in an hour if one lived near by takes a half-day or longer. Not being able to look in every day if we wanted to on our wine, to be able to taste it and guide it through, watch over it. To be out in the vineyard and feel the energy there, talk with the plants, prune at a leisurely pace, laugh and enjoy. It’s always a rush. Always a rush.

No, waiting is easy compared to all that. One day it’ll change. One day.