Diary Of A Start-Up Winemaker: 6 Works That Keep Us Sane

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If you're going to try to swim upstream and against the norm out in the wilds of the wine world, the more you have to keep you afloat in your darkest moments, the better. Here are six of those "life rafts" that have carried and comforted us: books and one movie in particular whose authors' knowledge and outlook buoy our spirits, make us laugh, and most importantly, remind us that no, we are not crazy.

1. Mondovino, by Jonathan Nossiter 
Scott and Stephanie: If there's a film that really lays it all out there, the difference between the ubiquitous international style of wine that has taken hold of the wine world (those wines that chase after scores in hopes of being the flavor of the day) and wines of "terroir" (those wines that simply reflect the individual and land that made them), it's this one. What the film did for us was reinforce that we were making the right decision in following a singular vision, instead of joining the race toward sameness.

2. Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines, by James E. Wilson 
Scott: This book, about vineyard geology in France, repeatedly pointed out that the one commonality among nearly all the great French vineyards was limestone (calcium carbonate) soils. When I started looking for a vineyard site in Oregon, the first thing I looked for was limestone deposits — there are almost none suitable for planting a vineyard. This caused me to ponder: What was so important about limestone? The answer is its pH buffering capacity. Most plants, including grape vines, prefer soils that are neutral to slightly basic in pH, and that's what limestone (or calcium-rich) soils provide. So I decided to look for soils in Oregon that were calcium-rich and that lead me to The Dalles environs.

3. A Cultivated Life: A Year in a California Vineyardby Joy Sterling 
Stephanie: We laugh now thinking that this is one of the first books I read to learn more about the wine industry and what we were getting ourselves into. To be fair, I gleaned a bit from the nuts and bolts Sterling bases her book on, like which shears work best for pruning (Felco), what happens when in the vineyard and winery, etc. She delivered on what a year's worth of growing, producing, marketing, and selling wine entails, and it made me nervous because it's a lot. But what she seemed to deliver more on was the ostentatious lifestyle of her and her family. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just how she delivered it. Nothing encapsulates this better than a single line of dialogue, when Sterling describes her "Daddy's" clothing and likens him to a Ralph Lauren ad. "Miffed" at such an idea, he replies, "Ralph Lauren is just an imitation of people like us."

No, from early on, our existence out in the wilds of the wine world would be so very far away from the world of Ralph et al., so much so that on the day we were to meet our vineyard manager to show him our property, I was vacuuming the dog for fleas and said, you know what our life is? It's the uncultivated life. (It's how I came up with the name for our blog, www.theuncultivatedlife.com.)
 

4. A Life Uncorked, by Hugh Johnson 
Scott: I learned a number of things from this book and it also reinforced a number of things that I already firmly believed about great wine. The most important thing I gleaned was Johnson's emotional connection to wine, and how he remembered the wines he had drunk by recalling the places, events, and people he had drunk them with.

5. The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, by Lawrence Osborne  
Scott and Stephanie: Aside from being an overall witty and intellectual read about one man's "irreverent journey through the wine world," this book justified our thinking, particularly about the importance of "place" in a wine. "Place," writes Osborne, "is no longer a fixed and stable thing whose qualities strike us with instinctual force. It has become a wobbly, vague parody that exists primarily in our mind's eye." We did not want to make a wine based on a parody of place. Ours was to be fully rooted (pardon the pun) in a particular environ that included the people (us) who made the wine, and clearly evident in our wine's eye.

Osborne also speaks to the international style of wine predominant in the word. You know, that wine made for the masses, and particularly for the few palates that reign supreme with their scores and judgments. One of the opening scenes finds him tasting the wines of Le Terraze, in Italy's Le Marche, whose maker, Antonio Terni, explains the international style as "the opposite of terroir. It's like airport architecture: a sort of nowhereness. But airports can be pleasurable." Some years before, on a quick trip to eastern/central Italy while we were living in Ireland, Scott and I stumbled upon Terni's Le Terraze. He offered us his "international" styled wine, Chaos, for tasting. Was it pleasurable? Enough. But a more resounding level of "nowhereness." We were not impressed.

6. Matt Kramer on Wine: A Matchless Collection of Columns, Essays, and Observations by America's Most Original and Lucid Wine Writer, by Matt Kramer 
Scott: In Kramer's book I ran across this question: "Isn't taste what fine wine is all about? Nope. You'd think it would be, but it's not so. Let me push this further: the purpose of fine wine is not to give pleasure, but to give insight... The greatest wines literally mark the land for us. They tell us something about the earth that we could not otherwise know. This is their pleasure, an insight so intrinsic that it endures and repeats itself over generations. Everything else is just, well, taste." 

Long before I had this book, and before our first harvest, we said the most important thing for us was to make wine that when you taste you know it could only have come from The Grande Dalles — from us and our land. I felt yet another level of vindication; we were doing it right.

 

With a vineyard planted in the "unproven" wilds of wheat country outside The Dalles, Ore., Scott Elder and Stephanie LaMonica struggle to promote their label, The Grande Dalles, and make a go of selling their wine. From the start, the couple has set out to do things their own way, with the belief that staying out of the crowd is better than being lost in it. These posts share their ups and downs.