and in the late afternoon, the birds’ feeding times, I’d go out with my shotgun and my ear protection in our little off-road vehicle called a Hester ag truck. A cross between a four-wheel ATV and a golf cart, it had big knobby tires to traverse the vineyards, a bench seat so two people could ride, and a three-foot-square bed behind the seat for supplies. When Alison was little, we went into the vineyard to scare birds every morning after the boys got on the school bus. I bundled her up and she sat in the supply compartment, holding on to the sides with both hands. We bounced up and down the vineyard rows, two fearless females protecting our crop. When it was time to stop and shoot, I put big earmuff protectors on her and popped the shotgun a few times. The birds left unscathed but the noise scared them and I had the satisfaction of doing something about the bird problem.
Harvest season is always the most stressful time of year. The birds can eat the whole crop, the weather is changeable, and I am acutely aware that the future of the wines hinges on my picking decisions. Every year has its own twists and turns, but when I think of harvests, my mind always jumps to the disaster of 1984—the harvest from hell.
That year an unusually cold and wet spring had delayed bloom until mid-July, almost a month late, so we knew harvest would also be later than normal. We would have to depend on Oregon’s classic Indian summer to finish the ripening process. In early October, I walked the vineyard monitoring the grapes. Plump Pinot Noir clusters hung in neat rows along the fruiting canes. They had turned purple, the first sign of ripening, but they were still tart and did not yet have the taste I knew they could acquire. We needed at least two more weeks of good weather to achieve the quality we needed. We never got it.
The rain started a week later and seemed like it would never stop. As the cold gray rain pelted the vineyard, I sat inside, frustrated, helpless, and miserable. I tried to keep myself busy, but all I could do was look out the window and worry, hoping that the next day Indian summer would arrive. I passed the time by baking, then eating, cookies: chocolate chip, butterscotch chip, oatmeal. Between the rain and my overeating, I was a colossal grouch.
After a week of heavy precipitation, it finally stopped; I went out to inspect the damage. A rain-forest dampness hung in the foggy air. The ground was so soggy that I knew we couldn’t get a tractor into the vineyard; it would have slid around on the hillside. The grapes tasted watery, their flavor diluted. The forecast was for more rain. I couldn’t believe it. What had happened to our Indian summer? We had always wondered which season was most critical and the consensus had been that they were equal in importance. The harvest of 1984 showed us that one season mattered most: Oregon’s typically long, warm autumn was the secret to its great grapes.
After agonizing whether to act now or take a chance the weather would improve, I decided to pull in the harvest. When we brought in the Pinot Noir, it had absorbed so much water it was almost 40 percent heavier than we had forecast. Then, the storm began again and we had to harvest the Chardonnay in the rain. I felt apologetic for the pickers who had to slosh uphill to the ends of the rows toting two buckets full of grapes, over thirty pounds each since we couldn’t get the tractor onto the steep slope at the lower end of the rows. We paid them extra to pick under those terrible conditions, and our picking contractor had boxes of fried chicken for his crew when they finished.
The wine reflected the watery harvest. Since vintage-dating a wine (vintage records the year the grapes were picked) denotes a more premium wine, we decided to declassify the wine by producing only a nonvintage Pinot Noir that year. This was our way of letting people know we didn’t think the wine was good enough to deserve vintage dating. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach every year that we get rain in September. A disaster like 1984 is always just a rainstorm away. When the sky is dark gray and the rain is coming down steadily, it’s hard to imagine sunny weather returning. But it always has, except for that one year, wedged in between the two stellar vintages of 1983 and 1985. The memory reminds me how dependent on Mother Nature we are.
I worked enthusiastically with my vineyard crew for the 1980s. We farmed the vineyard and the orchards, and planted more acres of grapes when we took the orchards out. We created a wine grape nursery and sold our grape cuttings to new vineyards arriving in the valley. We researched cover crops, pruning, trellising, and canopy management. With all that attention, the farm became profitable for the first time by the end of the decade, twenty years after we started.
IN THE EARLY 1980s, when our small group of local wineries decided to band together to form the Yamhill County Winery Association, our first joint project was for each of us to host an open house at our winery during the three days after Thanksgiving. The weekend became a wine country tradition, copied later by county winery groups all over the state.
The original nine wineries (Adelsheim, Amity, Arterberry, Chateau Benoit, Elk Cove, Erath, Eyrie, Hidden Springs, and Sokol Blosser) advertised together in Portland, Salem, and Seattle newspapers to lure people out to wine country. People were glad to get out of the house and show off Oregon’s newest industry to visiting friends and relatives. As the number of participating wineries grew, so did the number of visitors and the popularity of wine touring.
“Wine Country Thanksgiving” became our biggest retail weekend of the year. After the initial years of welcoming visitors in our small tasting room, we had to move the event into the larger winery cellar to handle the crowds. We served food, offered tastes of all our wines, lowered prices for the weekend, displayed holiday gift baskets, and brought in neighboring farmers to sell their chocolate-covered hazelnuts, flavored honey, marionberry preserves, and Christmas swags and wreaths. Holiday greens, wooden lattice, and bright red poinsettias helped mask the production equipment of tanks, barrels, catwalks, and refrigeration pipe.
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to go away for the Thanksgiving holidays, or to be free for shopping or whatever we felt like doing. It wasn’t an option. Wine Country Thanksgiving was too important to our business, so we made it a family event and tried to make it fun. In the early years, Bill’s mother, Grandma Betty, took charge of the tasting room kitchen, which was separated from the main space by a long counter on which she kept a large coffee urn for nondrinkers and designated drivers. She was adept at chatting with visitors while attending to her main job, slicing French bread to go with the cheese on the food platters. Tired of arm cramps from slicing baguettes to feed the increasing crowd, she showed up with a gift for the winery—an electric bread slicer. Bill’s father, Grandpa John, helped pour wine, stopping occasionally to chat with former patients who were delighted to see one of their favorite doctors. Usually they wanted to hang out at John’s table and talk, and we had to rescue him to keep the tasting line from backing up.
Nik, Alex, and Alison did whatever they were able to do, making change at the admissions table as soon as they were old enough, and later, when they were older and stronger, restocking wine, washing glasses, and carrying cases out for customers. Before we had a full-time bookkeeper, we made a custom each night of counting the day’s take. We brought the small gray metal cash box home and gave the kids the honor of doing the counting. They sat on the floor in the living room and learned, at an early age, how to put the bills in order, all facing the same way, how to count the change, arrange the credit card receipts, and fill out the cash-box records.
We were always on the lookout for vineyard or winery projects we could tackle as a family so the kids could be involved. One year Grandma Betty showed us an advertisement in a Christmas catalog for a package of shredded grapevines to be used as smoke flavoring for the grill. She brought it as a curiosity, but teenage Nik seized on the idea, and NGB (his initials) Enterprises was born. He tackled the production side, and I agreed to help with the packaging. We would sell it in the tasting room.
Production started that February, as Nik and Alex (NGB Enterprises’ first employee) pulled the vine prunings out of the vineyard rows. They kept the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay separate and transported the big piles of prunings down to the shed to dry out. Nik used
