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Out In the Vineyard With Carl

July 25, 2011 in A Sense of Place, Farming the Vineyard, Life of a Start-Up, Moving Along, Our Wine, Wine Marketing | 1 comment

Our latest installment on The Daily Meal. We (mainly me, Stephanie) write a bi-monthly piece called “Diary of a Start-Up Winemaker.” What we(well, I)’ve written to date are HERE.

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We’ve only been “in business” for just under a year, and are working on finding like-minded wine adventurers who appreciate wine like ours, as well as our endeavor. It’s a crowded, crazy market these days, as you all know, but we’re slowly reaching some of you individuals who dare to step off the well-worn route, or should I say, you’re discovering us, as true adventurers are apt to do.

Carl found us through Scott’s parents, out in Missouri. He was so interested in The Grande Dalles that he purchased six bottles of our inaugural wines: two ’09 Leroy’s Finest, our bone-dry Riesling; two ’08 Gampo, our sangiovese blend; and two ’08 Home Place, our tempranillo blend, just like that. Since his order, we’ve exchanged a few chit-chat messages, so imagine our surprise, when he told us he’d be out in the Pacific Northwest (a rare visit, he said) and wanted to meet! Our first fan from afar wanting to come and learn more! We were thrilled.

So off Sam and I went — Scott had to stay in Portland, holding down his day job that keeps this dream alive — to meet Carl.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Plant Grapes, Make Wine

July 1, 2011 in A Sense of Place, Life of a Start-Up, Moving Along, The Loss of the Unique, Wine Culture, Wine Marketing | 1 comment

As members of what amounts essentially to a farmer’s electric company cooperative, Wasco Electric, we receive their monthly publication, Ruralite, a magazine that covers life and individuals out in the agricultural reaches and towns they service. I enjoy reading it because it’s “real,” not air-brushed imagery or loaded with Madison Ave adverts, its glamour is in its simplicity. Anyway, after dinner I was thumbing through and came across an ad in Marketplace, that began, “Plant Grapes, Make Wine.” It went on to tell about the acreage and location of “prime, undeveloped land, water rights, blah blah blah” from a notable Washington State AVA. Didn’t I have a chuckle. How easy. Plant grapes, make wine. Just like that, people. And we wonder why the market is as the market is. Holy crap.

Chatting with Scott, he told me about a phone conversation he had with a wine broker? wine something or other, who said to him how she often checks the Oregon Liquor Control Commission website, and sees, as Scott relayed, “All the wineries springing up.” That’s right. springing up. And indeed they are. And we wonder why the market is as the market is. Yes, I’m saying it again.

For better or worse, we took a true path. Our endeavor was not one that sprung up. It’s been decades in the making, years of searching, and of waiting. We planted a vineyard on land that met our requirements, and we waited, to make wine based on Scott’s palate, one that he developed in France with one of its top wine merchants. Yeah!

And then there are ads like this, thank goodness, to leave us smiling even more, where someone 64 years young wants to meet “sexy looker that can treat me right and cook well.”  Ha! Good looking and a good cook! At least he didn’t ask for some sexy looker he can plant grapes and make wine with who’s also a good cook and on top of it all treats him right. I’d end our subscription.

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Going Our Own Way (S) | part 2 of 3

December 14, 2009 in The Straight Dirt, Our Story | No comments

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 »

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