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.
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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
1000 ships? I doubt it. Although at times I do feel this wine thing has NOT been of my own accord…[cue nervous laughter].
Let’s see, however, what this face of mine DOES launch. It’s something I quietly started a couple of weeks ago, but what the hell. There’s no better time than the present to send ‘er out to sea.
Enjoy.
Tags: Oregon, wine, wine startup
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.
Tags: vines, vineyard, vineyard manager, weather
HIGHLIGHTS: Rural Living in Wasco County: Who to Call. Time to Get Serious: To Do List.
COUNTDOWN: 39 WEEKS
Almost back on a Sunday posting schedule and now into Week Four of The Little House On the Hilltop (TLHOTH) project, let me share what’s happened.
Tags: Department of Fish and Wildlife, Farm Services Agency, FSA, individual, land management, Portland State University, rural living, The Little House On the HIlltop, Wasco County, Wasco County Clerk, Wasco County Soil and Water Conservation District, Wasco Electric Cooperative, Watermaster
Hip hip, hooray! It’s December’s last day! And wouldn’t you know – the sky is grey.
The drizzle may fall and the snow’s almost gone, but how the juncos flit along,
Through branches bare that drip with rain, like jewels (or bubbles of champagne).
A full year it’s been, with twists and turns, but that’s what makes each moment firm,
The memories and the days so clear — we welcome most the changing years.
Our Top 10 Highlights of 2009
Tags: bird netting, Columbia Gorge, juncos, kestrels, LaTourelle Falls, owl
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
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
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