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

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.

Slowly, we would learn to prepare ourselves for one of the four reactions we knew would typically follow once we shared our plans: 1. A blank stare; 2. An “Oh, how nice”; 3. How we were doing it all wrong: where we wanted to plant. Our trellis and canopy. Our vine spacing. Our varietals. Even how we wanted our wines to only be made with fruit from our vineyard and so were prepared to wait. Umm, hi. People. There are other ways of doing things. It was odd how quickly so many would disregard? forget? ignore? be oblivious to? that fact of life.

In some ways these reactions would be understandable. The industry had been in fact overrun with wine greenhorns all heading out to stake their claim in America’s Great Wine Rush; between 1999 and 2007, the number of wineries in the United States had increased by 83%. In Washington state alone, the number of wineries in the last ten years had increased 400%.  And mistakes in the vineyard are costly, in time and money. You better start it out right. Maybe people were trying to be helpful in their criticism, drawing from what they knew, what was proven, what they saw worked? Could be. Or could be they were expecting ill-prepared bumblers and threw us into that category? We’ll probably never know. My feeling is that whenever you question the prescribed norm, challenge the supposed authorities out there, there will be those who will not be happy, and they’ll let you know in one way, or another. Through upfront insults. Through silence and separation. Or through behind-the-back jabs that would result in local snickering and Scott being known as the “guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing out there.”

It’s true, it would be a tough site—the wind, the steep hillside, etc.—and the vineyard would show it. But we knew this, and knew how these elements would add greatly to our wine’s character. Anyway, as Scott admits, like in any new endeavor, there is a learning curve. No matter how much you know—and Scott would learn a considerable amount from his literature review where he would search out different opinions, studies and facts—whatever you decide to do in the vineyard must ultimately work in the end. Beginning with site selection and going all the way to picking and then pruning before the growing year would start again. But first you need a vision. And these people who poo-pooed us had no idea what that was. They only knew we were different.

They also didn’t know of the 50+ years of growing knowledge our vineyard manager would share. He himself an out-of-the-box, old-time grape grower who cut his teeth in California starting in the ‘50s, after a sheep ranch deal he moved his family from Nebraska for fell through (he is his own story, let me tell you). Just like everyone else, we’d have to “sell him” on our vision, have him visit the site, feel the soil, understand the weather and the wine we wanted to make before he signed on. It was this man who would become Scott’s sounding board, providing the practical experience Scott lacked to help guide our vineyard’s success. But I digress….

Finally, the fourth reaction: people who’d try to transfer their fear, distrust, and doubt to us, oftentimes from the moment we would introduce our endeavor and ourselves. “You’re not going to make any money,” one would tell us, an industry insider, these the actual first words out of her mouth. “Don’t ever call me again,” we’d hear from another, this one an established wine guy after he read our business plan, even though he would first tell us how happy he’d be to help.

The local agriculture community would be similar. “Why did you have to come here?” a wheat farmer would ask us at the beginning of a rather tense meeting where we were introduced to our neighbors. I understood their pain in having us join the community, to some degree; we were outsiders from Portland moving into the middle of their wheat country, ground homesteaded by Oregon Trail settlers. Big farms, old families. And our arrival meant changes in how they would have to be more careful with their chemical sprays NOT drifting into our vineyard (which is something they have to do anyway, by law). Regardless, people farming independently for generations do not like to be told how to do things, especially because of some new people on the block.

All in all, quite a reception. Scott and I would do a lot of headshaking, but it didn’t deter us. Obviously not, for here we still are. Note to self: Thank all these naysayers one day for making us even more determined. We would plant our vineyard smack dab in the middle of wheat country, and make our wine. Our way. And then, when it became time, enter the wine industry.

My wine and wine industry education began in earnest when we first began our search for land in southern Oregon in 2004, when Scott was looking for limestone. It would be in early December, the muted golden fields along the roadways spotted with frost, the air crisp with an early morning fog that rose from the streams flowing through the valley. From a viticultural aspect, it was on this trip that I began to become familiar with all the growing essentials: degree days, slope, aspect, soil composition, etc.; something Scott had speaking about and researching for some time, but I had never paid attention. From a marketing aspect, it was on this trip I began to become aware of other apparent “essentials,” ubiquitous in what I would find more and more to be the busy, loud, complicated, and confusing world of wine.

As a brand-writer and -storyteller, I have honed my skills to quickly be able to discern marketing schlock. At the start of every project I would examine competitor’s marketing blah blah, and that’s pretty much what a lot of it is out there: blah blah. It is. It’s crazy, the number of businesses who have no idea what they are really about, crazier yet they don’t take the time to figure it out. Instead, their material reads as if they put their own spin on what their competitors are saying, trying to make it fit for them. The result? Well, if you line ‘em up together, it’s hard to tell how companies are different; makes you wonder about their product, too. In short, a whole bunch of repitition, and oftentimes a whole lot of repeated wrong.

One big mistake we found taking place is the misuse of the “T” word (a word we most likely will never use because it’s so wrongly portrayed); as if you can sprinkle “T” from this vineyard and that and still speak of showcasing a wine’s “T”?! Fine when you blend, as so many do, grapes from different vineyards. But the whole idea of “T” is about its distinction. Not its combination. Hell, that’s like taking paintings from individual artists—Van Gogh, Monet, Pollack, etc.—chopping them up, and then recombining the pieces and trying to pass the new work off as a connected, seamless whole that, what? Highlights each artist in a way that makes the mélange even better than its original? What?! Even the “E” word I would find could no longer stand proudly as a simple harbinger of what might be in the bottle.

Then all the “Premier” this, “World-class” that. “Premium” and “Award-winning” at every turn. And what’s up with those pictures of Italy when the vineyard and winery are found in the USA? Or the French chateaus and Italian villas that sit as misplaced on the land as those little shopping “towns” springing up; you know, the ones trying to replicate a “small-town downtown USA” experience along a busy highway? When and why did reality get replaced with so much contrived entertainment and pretense? And all those wine-related tchotchkes for sale in wineries. Food, good. Local food, even better. But a t-shirt for Aunt Mary? A corkscrew for Uncle Jim?

Is this today’s wine experience? What about some wine and just leaving it at that? All the bells and whistles, dog and pony shows, and the wine hovering somewhere in the background. I would start to wonder, “Is there some wine marketing handbook out there that says this is how it needs to be?” ‘coz that’s what it would feel like to me. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m hip to the whole marketing-to-the-masses mind frame, and am thankful for the growing number of wine drinkers this marketing attracts, and for the producers who make wine available to them. But I’m also thankful for our quiet hill and the big sky and kestrels that hover near by.

What we would be told by industry people would be even more surprising than what I had uncovered in my marketing search, and of course something that did not at all jibe with our plans:

“Don’t wait for your vineyard to produce. First and foremost, get your label out,”

we would be told.

“Buy what you can, fruit or juice, slap your label on it and go.”

“But, but,”

we stammered,

“how would that separate our product, if we just do what others are doing?”

(We knew big vineyards were providing grapes to as many as 40 labels, if not more. Imagine that hustle.)

“Don’t worry about it. It’s the brand [Elwood], the brand!”

With my branding background I would fully understand what we were being told. But what I wouldn’t understand was its implication: the wine didn’t fully matter. Later on we would find this sentiment put into practice when we would become privy to an instance when the same exact wine would be hawked under three different labels; I can’t imagine that an isolated incident.

It would be interesting. How WOULD we succeed, with our plans and philosophy in such a busy, loud, doctored wine world? We would need an ally. Who would stand with Scott even when I would run for cover. We would find one all right. And that’s why I would run.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3/3, where you’ll also find out what happened to Jack, our dog.