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HIGHLIGHTS: Our first project fan. Pole building construction book. “Scott, do we have any kind of budget for this?!” The O’Neill Hay Barn (Mr. Gehry, we need you!).
COUNTDOWN: 42 WEEKS* (*Not knowing how long it’ll take for this project, I’m going to use the countdown to our inaugural wine release—around November 1—as something to shoot for, particularly since we can only fit 6 people in our camper comfortably – that’s not a very big party).
With Week One of The Little House On the Hilltop (TLHOTH) Project now behind us, let me share what’s happened.
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Tags: barn, Frank Gehry, Gehry, Gorge Games, inaugural wine, little house on the hilltop, New York, O'Neill Hay Barn, pole building construction, Powell's, Powell's Book Store, Ralph Wolfe, Simon Holloway, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack, upstate New York, Western barn, wine, yurt
Following a link from The Pour yesterday, I came across a funny sight that still mystifies me: a photo of a man pretending to sniff wine from an empty glass. The man was Gianfranco Soldera, and I swear to god, not only did that glass have nothing in it, it had no appearance of ever having any red wine in it, at least any brunello di montalcino, which is what this man made. Now, this jovial and grandfatherly looking fellow makes rather expensive wine (as Eric mentions, and that’s why I followed his link, to check him out since we’re making sangiovese from the brunello clone)—the most I saw on a quick search was $350 for a 1991—so why this empty-glass photo?
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Tags: brunello di montalcino, Heidegger, Montalcino, red wine, sangiovese, Soldera, The Pour, wine
Looking at my daily dose of wine news yesterday, I came across the most beautiful picture of a medieval castle, its timeless quality framed by a pine forest behind and an enchanting vineyard out front. How it sat there, majestic in its quiet (Samuel had just gone down for a nap and “quiet” was my word of the moment). My first thought was “Oh, how I miss Italy,” where I imagined this castle was. “Wouldn’t a dose of sunshine—or limoncello— in that land of rustic comfort and fine leather hit the spot right about now?” (it was 10 AM, PST, the rain coming down on a grey January morn, as I sat with my own rustic Oregon comfort, coffee). Then I saw the story’s headline, Wine Tales of The Decade.
“Maybe another Italian scandal,” I thought, thinking of the Brunello troubles. “Or MAYBE,” and this is what I secretly hoped it was, “that old buck of a Prime Minister has a new 18-year old wine heiress-mistress?” and with that thought in mind I settled in to read the juicy news.
Well. I was had.
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Tags: Antiques Roadshow, authentic, Bavaria, Braveheart, Brunello, California wine country, castle, County Meath, Germany, gigantism, Ireland, James Conaway, limoncello, McMansion, medieval architecture, medieval castle, Napa Valley, Oregon, provenance, Vanishing America, vineyard, wine, wine news
There a few things I hope to accomplish in 2010:
- Work on that attitude of mine;
- Establish a horseshoe pit;
- Get our wine sold;
- Submit another story (or two, but one’s a start);
- Build some shelter on our hilltop.
Each one you’ll most likely hear something about here at The Uncultivated Life, but it is to the last, the shelter on our hilltop, that I now write because seriously, enough is enough.
Almost four years into this, we need something on our hilltop other than our camper. Just a small something where someone like you, dear Reader, can come out and kick back; to sit and survey, look out and see and enjoy the quiet and the expanse, like a small oasis from the rest of the busy world. And someplace where the dreamer inside can go free. (Not to mention, we also need a place to store our farming gear, get that cute little tractor out of the elements, and clean up the clutter that drives me NUTso). As much as we may have started this for ourselves, it’s always been our hope to share it with other individuals who get it: the inherent beauty of a Western landscape; the timeless, intrinsic connection shared between the earth, its bounty, and the people who work it; the idea of possibility and the determination to go for it; the appreciation of the simple and authentic.
Right now, the camper is probably too simple. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: authentic, California quail, horseshoe pit, Hungarian partridge, juniper, Laura Ingalls, lupine, meadow lark, Missoula Floods, native grass, Oregon Trail, pheasant, pole barn, rammed earth, robin, sage, scrub oak, sparrows, straw-bale, The Dalles, vineyard, wheat, wine
Last week we tasted our very first bottled wine we made from our vineyard. What follows are some particulars regarding it.
The goal for our Riesling is to make it bone dry. No residual sugar. We planted Riesling because that is Scott’s favorite white wine. We have 4 rows’ worth on the south side, and around 3 acres on the north, for around 3.5 acres in total. Since our budget has only allowed us to trellis the south side, it is from here, some of the steepest ground on our site, where we take our harvest to date.
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Tags: 2008 harvest, minerality, residual sugar, Riesling, sugar/acid balance, vineyard, white wine, wine
[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
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
People who can’t wait for the table to be poured drive me nuts. You know, the ones who reach for their glass the minute the bottle is lifted away? I don’t know why, but outside of my buddies in Europe, I know a lot of people like this. People, who, like a nervous herd of gazelles gathered at a pond, lower their heads and quickly drink, as if this immediate gratification will save them from the lion about to pounce. Makes me wonder if this behavior IS vestige to our time on the savannah, when we had to dine and dash because we knew the lion was lurking close by? Today, 1.8 million years after the appearance of Homo erectus, what’s wrong with breaking from the herd and slowing down a bit?
I started thinking about this not only because ‘tis the season of celebrating and friends gathering, but because of our 16-month (partner and) son. He loves to have a “fancy drink”—something we believe he thinks is more special than the milk, water, or diluted juice he typically quaffs—especially when we celebrate occasions like the bank giving us more money to limp through another growing and wine making year on, or the end of harvest, and I want my little guy to join in and engage with those around him fully in the occasion. To break from the herd. Slow down. To know he is no longer on the savannah. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Europe, global world, harvest, herd, herd mentality, Homo erectus, host, hostess, individual, social class, survival of the fittest, wine, 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
