When I filmed this on Monday, there was indeed a red flag fire warning for our vineyard area. Today, Thursday, there is none. This does not eliminate the actuality of fire occurring, just lessens the chances, for NOW. And I have no idea why I blink like a fish. I guess I’m tired. Blame it on the heat. For sure it’s not because of anything else in my life, since it IS so leisurely…
This was written on Sam’s Birthday, two days ago, but due to that day’s party and our Mt. Hood Railroad trip yesterday, it’s getting posted today.
Hip hip hooray! Our little one’s two today! Scott’s just going upstairs to get him from his getting shorter-yet-still-sweet Sam nap, guests to arrive in an hour or so, probably later, knowing this crowd. Backyard is decorated with crepe paper flutters hanging from the apple tree, a birthday toad, and bunch of balloons, and the Mother is just finishing up her version of a Thomas cake.
I’m taking a moment’s rest, for, besides running around with b-day prep, the wine life and other life necessities have crept in. The first one is the new threat of wildfire. It’s been hideously hot here, and now thunder clouds are beginning to accumulate near Mt. Hood, causing a swath of land to be under fire-alert, and our vineyard is in that swath. Lovely.
Then, the marketing aspect — meeting with the designer (the gal I’m swapping my writing with) and web programmer, to find out we need to rethink website to keep costs down and now I’m really under the gun to get all the copy written. ARgh. This following that same morning a sewer scope for the new house we’re trying to get so we can FINALLY get out of this shoebox (I’ll have to share one day, or not, the long story of why the farm prevented us from getting even a much larger house. You can imagine…tax returns showing losses, arsehole banks who caused all this mortgage trouble being bigger arseholes than ever before… you get the picture) — anyway — it’s a lovely small, but larger than this shoe-box home very close to a great 80-some acre forested Portland city park, Pier Park, yet still not in The Dalles or on our land, which is where we want to be. And then somewhere between the scope and the design meeting, a lovely chat with an editor from Snooth.com, where I actually cried recounting the sacrifices for this endeavor. Geez. I thought I had been through all that with my therapist!
But for now, Sam’s two. And we have a party. And the sun is shining, and it’s not as hot as it’s been. As long as the fires don’t come, what a great afternoon lays in store.
Tags: Mt. Hood Railroad, Pier Park, Snooth.com
It’s up to you, New York. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s obviously up to our wine, but after the trip we just returned from, and all the positive feedback we had from the critics, editors and journalists we met with, you just never know.
Tags: bone dry riesling, David Rosengarten, James Beard House, oysters and riesling, sangiovese, Saveur Magazine, tempranillo, Tony Mantuano
HIGHLIGHTS: Preliminary Design Package Done, On to Phase II. Sneak Peak! Junk the Countdown. Inching Along: To Do List.
JUNKED* COUNTDOWN: 17 WEEKS *(Last time you’ll see this particular countdown. See below.)
Twenty-six weeks. That’s half a year. If this were the only thing going on in our lives I’d be rather ashamed at not being further along. But between taking care of Samuel and the nanny being sick and hawking our wares in NYC, house chores and a bunch of family-based travel, Week Twenty-Six and where we are in it is a wonderful half-way point. Not that I know where and how and most importantly WHEN this Little House On the Hilltop Project will end. But halfway sounds just right. So halfway here we are. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: fundraising, Germ-English, ricotta cheese cake, The Little House On the HIlltop, vineyard, Wasco County, wine endeavor
That’s what a dear friend of mine suggested, after I gave her a peek into our journey to NYC for a media tour with journalists and editors. We found ourselves at Saveur’s First Annual Summer BBQ, living the good life, if even for those few hours. She thought I might have just passed from life, uncultivated, to something more upscale. But no. I was still the same old sweaty me, with shiny nose and limp hair in that NYC heat, hoping the sway of Pier 66 wouldn’t make me lose any of that just eaten strip steak slider with truffled robiola or any of those mojitos I was more than happy to imbibe under the circumstances. And my feet hurt, wearing my mother’s vintage golden goat-skin shoes through all those dirty streets and up the skinny stairs at the James Beard House and in and out of cabs and elevators and ugh. Cultivated life, indeed. I just hope my lipstick was on straight while I was there.
Tags: First Annual Summer BBQ, James Beard, Pier 66, Saveur
The rest of the story.
From how we got Leroy to come on board in 2004, up to our 2006 meet-and-greet with our disgruntled neighbors AFTER we established our farm site.
Enjoy.
So I found out that trying to talk through five years while looking at a camera in my car is no easy task. Yes, I look different in places, since I had to fill in what I forgot and film on another day. I need a stylist.
This excerpt takes you through the “how did they even start on such crazyness” to finding a real treasure down in Roseburg, our vineyard consultant, Leroy.
Enjoy.
Tags: vineyard startup
Scott’s off to Yakima, WA today [note: which really was Saturday], a good 2-hour trip NNE of The Dalles. He’s returning some bird netting; it’s good to get some money BACK for once. Ever since our first harvest in 2008, birds have been, how shall we say, an issue once the grapes ripen. Never thought they would be, since there are no roosting trees around, it’s just those little darned wings that take them places we forgot about.
That first harvest year we tried a couple things: the intermittent cannon blasts (lasted until the neighbors asked us to turn it off, so we did—it wasn’t working, anyway), and the bird distress call, a microchip of birds in distress, plus the predatory birds causing it. Also had a crazy little rendezvous around Mt. Hood to pick up the chip we needed—for it to work you have to have distress calls of the birds that have taken over your vineyard, like starlings and robins. Somehow we had coastal bird noises on the chips we had borrowed from a neighboring cherry orchardist, and it was soon very obvious that starlings don’t give a rat’s ass about one of their feathered brethren like a seagull calling out in distress: “Too bad for you, brother, there are grapes to eat.” So after identifying which birds in particular had invaded our vineyard, we set off to pick up the chip in the little mountain-like community of ZigZag, just at the base of Mt. Hood, the bird chip people meeting us half-way between their Sisters, Oregon location.
We already knew it might be too late for us, since birds had already found the treasure in our vineyard. The trick is that you must put these calls out BEFORE any of these ravenous monsters find your crop. But we were desperate; there were too many birds, and too small a harvest, getting smaller by the day. Samuel was only 2-months old, and if being new parents wasn’t enough, we were new harvest people, and had this bird issue.
Tags: bird distress call, bird netting, Brooks Meadow Road, Dufur Mill, Gnarl Ridge Fire, grapes, Mt. Hood, Oregon, robins, Sisters, starlings
And it just keeps coming! This one touches upon the stone swept into our vineyard land and surrounding area from the great Missoula Floods, those cataclysmic dispatches of water that thundered out of Montana, across Washington and through the Columbia Gorge into Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the last ones some 12-14,000 years ago. It was these that formed the landscape around us, as well as carved out the magnificently scenic Columbia River Gorge. We’ve got tons of this washed-in gravel on the site, dug through around 300 feet of it for our well before hitting basalt (what the volcanoes flowed in). It’s some wild, rugged land out there, I tell you.
Tags: basalt, Columbia River Gorge, Missoula Floods, Montana, vineyard, volcanoes, Washington, Willamette Valley
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