to the enjoyment of drinking and eating well.
L’Chaim and Bon Appétit!
SUSAN SOKOL BLOSSER
Dayton, Oregon
December 2016
CHAPTER ONE
Mac & Cheese Days
In the last two weeks of 1970, my husband, Bill Blosser, and I each gave birth. I had our first child, Nik, and Bill closed the deal on our first piece of vineyard land. We were together in our excitement about both, but since the vineyard began as Bill’s passion and I was utterly alone having Nik (fathers at that time weren’t allowed in the delivery room), I think of them as one birth for each of us.
Baby Nik actually had a longer gestation period than our land purchase. The idea of a vineyard seemed to arrive out of nowhere, a bit of whimsy that took on a life of its own. We were driving our Volkswagen camper bus from Chapel Hill back to Oregon, where Bill was to teach urban planning at Portland State University. Near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we stopped to browse at a flea market. It was Pennsylvania Dutch country, and we thought we might find an antique treasure hidden in the junk. We meandered through with the other bargain hunters and, somewhere in the midst of tables laden with wooden clocks, rusty fruit bins, and old kitchen utensils, Bill started talking about starting a vineyard. He later confessed he had been thinking about it for some time and finally had enough nerve to bring it up.
“What do you think about growing grapes?” he asked, as we bent over a particularly handsome mantel clock.
“Grow grapes?” I asked. I turned to look at him. “You mean to make wine?” His question—unexpected and unconventional—startled me.
“Why not? I think it would be a neat thing to do.” He sounded a bit defensive and I understood why. It was a wild, improbable idea.
We lost interest in the mantel clock and headed back to our camper. All the way back to Oregon, this outlandish idea kept coming up. We’d drive along in silence, listening to whatever local radio station we could get, and suddenly Bill would bring up the subject, again. I listened, wanting to be a supportive wife, and the more we talked about it, the more interesting it became.
We both liked wine. Bill had spent a year in France during college, taking classes in Paris and then working as a dishwasher at a mountain resort near Grenoble. He had emerged from that experience a wine-drinking, French-speaking Francophile, with a worldliness that had attracted me to him in college. I had spent the summer after high school studying in France, and I had grown up drinking wine from my father’s wonderful wine cellar.
The idea of going back to the land and growing something that made life more enjoyable appealed to us. We would never have been attracted to soybeans or corn, but growing wine grapes had both aesthetic and emotional appeal. Wine symbolized culture and sophistication. People had been making wine for centuries—how hard could it be?
Really hard, as it turned out. The arrival of our two new babies determined the direction of our lives from then on. In our mid-twenties, we had been married four years, and had spent most of that time in graduate school, first in Oregon for my Master of Arts in Teaching from Reed College and then in North Carolina for Bill’s Master of City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We had studied hard and played hard.
Our 1968 Volkswagen camper bus, a miniature house on wheels, had carried us all over the continent. We hiked and picked wild huckleberries in the Mount Adams Wilderness in Washington State. We camped near Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park and fled, early the next morning, singing loudly to scare off a nosy grizzly bear that had appeared during the night. We drove to Lake Louise and across the wheat-colored plains of Saskatchewan, fighting headwinds that held our boxy vehicle under forty miles per hour. We explored the entire Blue Ridge Parkway of Virginia and North Carolina, sleeping in the bus and cooking over campfires, stopping only for supplies and a new block of ice for our tiny refrigerator. With no kids, no pets, no house to worry about, we never hesitated when another trip beckoned.
Summers in Chapel Hill, we played tennis every evening, waiting for the muggy heat to retreat before we went out. Winters, we tried out complicated recipes from Julia Child’s new cookbooks. We judged the recipes by how long and involved preparation was against how much we enjoyed eating the finished product. Over elaborate dinners with the other student couples, mostly Northerners like us who were fascinated with Southern culture, we discussed politics, civil rights, and feminism. We protested the Vietnam War and drove to Washington, DC with friends to join the candlelight vigils and marches.
When the baby and the vineyard arrived, life abruptly changed course. Road trips, camping and hiking, tennis after dinner, spontaneous parties—all these became memories. After a few years, I started to think of them as a past life.
Back in Portland, we found a house to rent and began researching the geography, soils, and climate that wine grapes required. We had celebrated our engagement at a picnic on the grounds at Beringer Winery in 1966, but locating in Napa didn’t interest us. Other parts of northern California might be possible. On a visit to Bill’s folks in Oakland, we scouted for possible vineyard sites around Ukiah and Mendocino, where Bill’s family had homesteaded in the 1850s. Northern California could be the place for us, but we continued looking.
Driving through Oregon’s Willamette Valley countryside one Saturday, we stopped at a one-room real estate office in Newberg to inquire about land. It was useless to ask directly about vineyard land back then, because real estate agents had no idea what that meant. Bill was describing the kind of land he was looking for, in terms of slope and exposure and soils, when the agent said, “See that guy over there, looking at the book of listings? He just asked me the same question.” That guy, Gary Fuqua, was soon to plant one of the earliest vineyards in the Dundee Hills and become one of Bill’s best friends.
The real estate agent, shaking his head at what crazy things people wanted to do, tried to help. “Have you talked to the guy up on Kings Grade Road?” he asked. “A big friendly guy. He has just planted a vineyard and seems to know what he’s talking about.” Following the agent’s directions, we found the ramshackle house where Dick Erath, his wife, Kina, and their two toddler sons were living. Dick had bought the property and planted vines in 1968.
But Dick and Kina had not been the first, either. Two other couples, the Courys and the Letts, had bought land in the Willamette Valley a few years earlier. Dick and Nancy Ponzi had also just bought land. These four couples were working regular jobs, living as cheaply as possible, and putting all their extra time and money into their vineyards. Finding them inspired us to keep going; we were not alone.
These founders of the Willamette Valley’s wine industry, plus those who, like us, came shortly after—Myron Redford, David and Ginny Adelsheim, Joe and Pat Campbell—stood out with their quirky individuality. Scruffy sideburns, beards, and mustaches aside, they were smart and enterprising, finding various paths to wine, discovering it as a passion and changing course to pursue it against all odds. With diverse backgrounds in engineering, music, philosophy, history, and the humanities, coupled with a fierce spirit of independence, we were united in a passion for Pinot Noir. We were trying something that hadn’t been done before and we eagerly shared information. The collaborative nature of the Oregon wine industry became one of its most notable features. Did any of us anticipate that our youthful adventure would create an industry that would, in one generation, add over two billion dollars to the Oregon economy? I surely didn’t.
In the early 1970s, it was a boys club. And an interesting group of boys it was. Dick Erath brought his engineering mentality and love
