vineyard
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[We tasted some of our wine last week. A Riesling. What we thought of it is in the next post.]
There it was. A bottle of wine from our vineyard on our kitchen table. Our wine. That we made. At long last. I couldn’t believe it.
You ever look at a “long-term project,” could be something or someone—like finally doing that remodel, the long-awaited high-school graduation of your more “difficult” child, that friend who simply never learns, making peace with an in-law or own parent…—and in a moment of realization, no matter how brief or lasting, you are simply thrilled by what’s there? “Ahh, look,” you might think, “all the WORK and TIME and EFFORT and SACRIFICE worked out. For all of us.” You pat yourself on the back, thankful that you never stopped believing. Or, if you did stop believing somewhere along the journey, it could go the other way, and you think, “[Expletive!] All that and for what? This?!”
I must confess: I was pretty excited by the fact that there was a bottle of our wine—OUR VERY FIRST BOTTLE!— sitting on our table, and secretly hoped I would be in my former category of long-term project reactions. But I am torn in this endeavor. I am. At times glowingly on board, I am a great believer, at others, I wish for my own quiet mountaintop to simply get away. But I am on no mountaintop, and there was our wine. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bistro Cooking, bull snake, charcuterie, Chris Van Allsburg, Patricia Wells, Riesling, Rob McMillan, Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Wine Division, The Polar Express, vineyard, wine
Hooray! The Dalles has been named a “True Western Town” in True West Magazine’s top 10 list of, you guessed it, “True Western Towns” for 2010.
I’ve always had the feeling, from the first time we showed up and actually spent some time in The Dalles looking for vineyard ground—instead of simply rumbling by on 84 as I imagine most do, because honestly, from a car window, The Dalles kind of shows its ass to the world and who would want to stop? The auto repair and RV spots, the strip malls and former old rundown Aluminum factory site now razed to a bunch of bare earth and that’s probably enough—that it was, at its soul, a quiet, Western town. And it is: at its center you’ll find restored, 19th century Victorians; one-way down-town streets lined with high-windowed brick buildings; farm rigs and big hats going by; cowboy boots and western wear; plus all what the article in True West speaks of. And all against the backdrop of enormous, grassy hills that echo Connemara to me—or pictures I’ve seen of New Zealand—on the Washington side, and heights of basalt outcroppings with scrub oak and sage on the Oregon side; the Western character is hard to miss. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: basalt, Big West, Cascade Range, Columbia Gorge, Columbia River, frontier, Hood River, kestre, kestrels, Leone western, Lewis Mumford, Mt. Hood, Portland, sense of place, The Dalles, vineyard, Western town
You know how when you meet someone and you immediately bristle with dislike? The very next morning after our Ireland return, greatly jetlagged yet fresh-faced, we would drive out to meet the person potentially interested in selling us some land, Old Wise All. At that time, he would be our only chance because from all the ground Scott had identified as prime for our venture, he was the only landowner who would show any interest in letting some go. Scott would have the vineyard fever in him, and somehow it would feel like we had crossed a now-or-never threshold. Whatever it took.
Of course our budget would determine just how far we could go. And Old Wise All would be privy to the numbers; his interest in our budget and Scott’s willingness to hand it over land (physically) unseen, man unmet, would put me on high alert towards the whole deal from the get go: why would someone just interested in selling land want to know our entire budget for the endeavor? And why would Scott hand that over to a stranger?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 1950s, bare wheat ground, female intuition, land sale, linguistic, martini, meadow lark, Oregon, Portland, The Dalles, The Grande Dalles, vineyard
If ever you loved someone enough to see in their eyes the hopes and dreams they carry with them, and you know for a fact they aren’t clinically crazy, you’d know there is no other way to think: we would find a way. And how lucky, we thought, to be undertaking such a venture in a land of opportunity and community, our home country, the USA. Where the entrepreneur would be welcomed and embraced (Small Business, the backbone of America!)! Where the agricultural community would be glad to have (fairly) young people like us who wanted to keep the family farm alive and well! Where the wine world would greet a newcomer with—at the minimum—well, civility, wine being after all, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, “the most civilized thing in the world.”
Didn’t we have it wrong. Please don’t misunderstand, we never expected to show up at the party and have everyone love and support us from day one, but we would be greatly ill-prepared for how we and our endeavor would be treated: with veiled skepticism, if not outright negativity, and a little goodwill thrown in, but not very much. And from almost everyone we’d meet or speak to about our endeavor: realtors, family, friends, banks, potential investors, neighboring farmers, wine industry members, public relations people. You name it.
We weren’t famous, rich, or connected and any one or the combination of the three would’ve brought us, Scott suspects, immediate approval; established people always get the benefit of the doubt—new people do not. But we were new people, with not necessarily new, but different ideas of doing things, in a new—and, in the wine world, even though the ground is in the Columbia Valley AVA, unproven—location. And people would not let us forget any of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: big sky, brand writer, canopy, chemical sprays, Columbia Valley AVA, degree days, entrepreneur, Ernest Hemingway, French chateaus, Great Wine Rush, individual, Italian villas, kestrels, local food, marketing, Oregon Trail, picking, pruning, site selection, Small Business, soil, soil composition, steep hillside, tchotchkes, trellis, vine spacing, vineyard, vineyard manager, Washington state, weather, wheat farmer, wine, wine industry, wine world, Wineries in the United States
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Berkeley, Cornell University, family farm, France, individual, Napa, National Energy Lab, Red Mountain, vineyard, wine
No critic has ever said it better:
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.…[T]here are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations.” Anton Ego, Ratatouille
Yes, I took a quote from a movie about a rat who wanted to cook. If you’ve seen the film, you’d understand. Or maybe not. But if you’ve ever attempted to step out and do something new, be it enter a new industry or profession, run a race, hell, cook a soufflé, there will be those—critics— who cut you down, telling you you can’t because you’re not experienced enough, out of your league, don’t have what it takes, or, you’re not following the “club rules.”
I’m just perplexed as to why? (Wasn’t I perplexed in my last post, too? Is it the full moon? Or is it that time of year?!) Monsieur Ego provides some insight. Be you a professional critic or simply an armchair pessimist (like myself), there’s no risk when you criticize someone else. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: critics, ego, Ratatouille, sauna, vineyard, wine making
Alone on a western, windy hill, sitting bold among the old wheat fields, a small, determined vineyard grows, and an uncultivated life unfolds. The story of The Grande Dalles vineyard and its wine, The Uncultivated Life is our tale as newcomers in rugged wheat country starting from scratch to pound out a dream of farming and wine outside The Dalles, Oregon.
If you’re looking for a wine story with grit, look no farther. The trouble is, at this time it’s hard to tell which has been grittier: the story with all its ups and downs; the emotional toll of sticking with it and our ideas, particularly despite the gobs of naysayers who want to so quickly snuff our flame; or the ground rock in our vineyard.
So far, unlike the landscape that surrounds our vines, the story hasn’t been pretty. Rather, it’s been one of greed and deceit, of betrayal and misfortune, of sacrifice and struggle and NOT what I thought I was signing up for four loooong years back. “It’s not what I signed up for either,” chimes in Scott tersely. Honestly, neither of us expected it to be, well, like this (it’s just that Scott can handle it better). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: basalt, behind-the-scenes, Columbia Gorge, dirt, minerality, Oregon, struggle, vineyard, weeds, Wild West, wine
