got carried away designing the packaging. I pictured people grilling with Pinot Noir Grapevine Smoke and then drinking Pinot Noir with their meal, so I decided to package the smoke and the wine together, in a two-bottle wine box. This required putting the new product in a long, narrow, special-order plastic bag that, when filled, would be about the size of a wine bottle. And if there was to be a card for the directions (simple: soak in water before putting over the coals on the grill), why not print recipes on the other side? I found a woman to create recipes for both the Pinot Noir and the Chardonnay. When she tried out the two different Grapevine Smoke samples, she called to say, “I never would have guessed how striking the taste difference was between the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay smoke. It’s amazing!”
The final step was to have a colorful label designed and printed. I spent more time on this project than I had intended and did all the running around, since Nik wasn’t old enough to drive. But I enjoyed the challenge. We sold the individual bags in the tasting room and made up gift boxes with the wine and matching Grapevine Smoke.
The next year we decided to offer our new product to Norm Thompson, a Portland catalog company whose slogan was Escape from the Ordinary. Nik and I visited the Norm Thompson headquarters to pitch the new package we had devised—a slatted wooden crate containing one bag each of Pinot Noir Grapevine Smoke and Chardonnay Grapevine Smoke shrink-wrapped so that the products, labels, and recipe cards were clearly visible. To our delight, their buyer loved it and ordered one thousand boxes.
We had made only a hundred bags of each type of Grapevine Smoke the first year, but Nik and I jumped at the chance to be in the prestigious Norm Thompson catalog, and ignored the logistics of increasing production by a factor of ten. Production went into high gear. Every weekend the extended family gathered in the equipment shed to tackle the mounds of shredded, dried grapevine prunings. As the rain pounded on the metal roof, we ran our little assembly line and managed to keep our good humor, as long as we could see progress. I applied our fancy self-stick labels to the plastic bags, then Grandma Betty, Grandpa John, and Nik, in white dust masks, filled them with the Grapevine Smoke. Bill ran the temperamental hot sealer to close the bags. Alex put the bags in the crates so they could go to Portland for shrink-wrapping. Alison was too little to do much but play and get in the way. The final product was impressive and we were proud to see it in the catalog. Nik made enough money to buy himself a used car. But that was the end of the Grapevine Smoke caper. Nobody was willing to do it again.
Growing up around the winery meant a lot of watching Mom and Dad pour wine for customers, talk about the wine, and sell it. Kids are nothing if not imitators, so I guess it was natural for me to want to copy them and sell something to customers, too. Since the cherry trees on our farm happened to be in season, I decided cherries would be what I would sell. The tasting room was open only on weekends, so if I wanted to do this, it would mean giving up watching Saturday morning cartoons, but I decided getting up early to pick the fruit and pack it in the little green pint fruit cartons, ready to sell to customers, would be worth it. I was probably eight years old. I thought I had told Mom what I was planning but she looked surprised when she found me setting up shop at a picnic table outside the tasting room with my baskets of cherries and free samples.
Then, one May when I was nine years old, our local volcano, Mount Saint Helens, spewed ash across the western US. My brother and I took advantage of this opportunity, collected buckets of ash, put it in little plastic baggies, and sold them to visitors as genuine Mount Saint Helens ash souvenirs.
My next venture was “Grapevine Smoke.” Mom had heard about using chopped up grapevines for barbecuing to add smoke flavoring. This ended up being our most complicated venture to date, with recipes, a chopping and bagging operation, and ultimately placement in a catalog for home chefs. The Grapevine Smoke business earned me enough money to buy my first car, after I was old enough to get my driver’s license. The catalog company eventually stopped ordering, I went off to college, and I gave the car to my brother, who I felt had earned it from all his labor helping me.
Nik Blosser
Chairman of the Board, Sokol Blosser Winery
The Newport Seafood and Wine Festival, which took place in the city of Newport on the Oregon coast in February, was another family event. The Newport Chamber of Commerce started the festival in the early 1980s to lure people to the coast during the winter, and we supported it for many years, spending the weekend at a local motel. Bill’s folks went along. John helped us pour wine while Betty entertained the three kids. She took them to the aquarium, the wax museum, and the beach. I know her job was harder than ours. Every morning, before the festival started, all of us went to a local restaurant famous for their poppy-seed pancakes. It was as close to a vacation as we got for many years.
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