Diary Of Start-Up Winemaker: Our Five-Year Vineyard Anniversary

2008 : The Fight for Our Land, Sam is Born, and Our First Vintage

 

Our land purchase was a seller-financed sale. Sometime in mid/late 2007 we wanted to pay that note off and get bank financing. You'd think that would be something easy-breezy. But no. The rift caused during the Summer of the Big Fish reared its head, and soon, a whole lot of legal headache ensued. The seller hemmed and hawed, not sure he wanted to close the deal with us, even though our contract said we could. After months of agonizing back and forth, where the property owner's lawyer told us our original documents may not even hold up, Scott had reached his limit, and dropped the little "S" word (rhymes with "blue") in early 2008. Funny how things happened so quickly after that. For within two days or so, on a snowy, late-winter '08 Sunday in a suburban hotel room, lawyers at our side, we hammered out an agreement in a number of hours; the land was ours. 

Scott kissed the ground when all was said and done, and we made up lyrics to "This land is my land," ones that might get us in trouble if we were to sing it in public, although put into the context of the time, the words are spot-on, and provable, so we'd be safe, I think. Sam was on his way, born on a hot Thursday in July, and then our first harvest. Hooray!

The birds that had descended on our field like a Hitchcock film resurrected hadn't taken all our fruit, and so we decided, even without having an investor, that we'd make wine. We had hoped we'd have *someone* to help us share the risk, for at this time, we were in it DEEP. We first tried to sell our grapes, but Scott had too many of what he referred to as "Beavis and Butthead" hehe responses from local wine people who didn't want to commit until way late in the game. So Scott said, "Screw it." We would make wine. It was Sam's birth year after all, and we needed to commemorate it.

Luckily we were put in touch with a local winemaker who agreed to let us make wine at his facility. It's not typical, that someone tells a winemaker how to make wine under a "custom crush" designation, but thankfully we found someone willing to simply ensure sound wine-making practices while allowing Scott full creative license. For while Scott had no hands-on experience per se, he knew what we wanted, and how that could be achieved through the process of winemaking; all his research and conversations with French and California experts confirmed his ideas. Our approach was very simple: let the wine be what the season gave us, period. No hocus pocus winemaking as is prevalent in today's market, adding/removing acid, tannins, color, etc. 

This guy was a big sceptic, as were all the people we had met to date out there, but he would change his mind after tasting our fruit, and our wine, yes, he would change his mind. 

While things were coming along on the vineyard and wine front, Stephanie pretty much went AWOL from farming; mothering without having a "village" around her took its toll, with sleep deprivation and post-partum depression thrown in for fun. How Scott held it all together that year, you will have to ask him yourself.