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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
To give myself a little break from all this writing, I asked Scott to write a little “report” on Liquid Memory, a fairly controversial book by Jonathan Nossiter (see 11/17/09 The Pour Posting). I haven’t read it myself yet, but my guess is, I’ll just love it, as I found Mondovino, Nossiter’s film, a wonderful glimpse into the international world of wine. Mondovino felt like a parody on the industry, and while I just giggled through many parts, or shook my head in disbelief at the obnoxious egos flying around the world, you can imagine it was not well-received in the industry. The same way a Michael Moore film is met by the industry he exposes. So I’m very curious about Liquid Memory.
Well, I guess I forgot to ask Scott to state his opinion of the book, because what we have here is a bare bones synopsis (now I know why he got his PhD in chemistry and not philosophy: less writing). So to give more insight into what Scott thinks of Nossiter, I’ve included his two comments to The Pour’s 11/17 posting. One more than the other is somewhat out of context on its own, but if you’re interested, you can go and read the whole string, which I hope you do.
Tags: biodynamic, globalizing economies, homogeneity, individual, Jonathan Nossiter, Liquid Memory, Michael Moore, Mondovino, Nossiter, palates, wine, wine quality, winemaking
All the Difference posts are about those people (and ideas) who dared to step off the busy highway and to follow one less worn for wear. Away from the crowds, these individuals walk to their own beat, with unexpected and singular results that may not always be for everyone, but that, my guess, was never the point.
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Carleton Watkins. Just east of Oregon’s famed Multnomah Falls is a small gorge, named after my hometown, Oneonta, New York. Not looking like much from the Old Scenic Highway, it’s often overlooked; there are no monumental cascades visible from the road like some of the other parking-lot stops, just a dark, narrow, mossy chasm, where icy, rushing water squeezes between what looks like the stems of two basalt toad-stool protrusions growing from the rock walls, one on either side, their caps reaching out across the slippery current, as if about to touch. I always wondered why it was called Oneonta—there are a couple Oneonta’s across the US and I couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with my upstate New York birthplace. What did I know?
Tags: Adirondacks, Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, Catskills, Central Pacific Railroad, Collis Huntington, Columbia Gorge, Columbia River, Gold Rush, individual, John Laursen, landscape photography, Lewis and Clark, Multnomah Falls, New York, Oneonta, Oneonta Gorge, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, Robert Vance, salmon, Terry Toedtemeier, Wild Beauty, Yosemite, Yosemite Valley
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
“The uniqueness of America would prove to be its ability to erase uniqueness.” Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience.
When I started writing this post a few days ago I was going to feed off of this quote. My plan was to essentially speak to how it might apply to the homogenization of the wine industry that is reducing the availability of the individual wine. About the traveling winemakers who add to it. About mega-vineyards and mega producers adding to it. Of the selling out to big business and then the consolidation of brands adding to it. Maybe I would’ve hinted at singular palates—yes, the RP effect—and their influence adding to it. Would’ve shared some trade secrets about how, unbeknownst to consumers, different labels are used for the very same wine and how all of this factual information points to wine commonality now more than ever before. Then I would’ve finished it off with a resounding, “America needs more of its own wine that’s uncopyable and individual!” or something like that, to continue the idea at another time.
But then I read The Pour’s latest post, False Demons, where Eric (Eric, we’ve never met, but may I call you Eric?) critiques a new wine book, Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters as well as its author, Mondovino’s Jonathan Nossiter, and in effect dismisses a big claim Nossiter hangs his hat on about wine, claiming instead that unique wine is out there, more readily available than ever before.
Tags: Daniel Boorstin, historical memory, individual, Jonathan Nossiter, Mondovino, Nossiter, wine book, wine for the individual
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