by twenty-foot trees with frothy white, sweet smelling blossoms, listening to the steady hum of the bees doing their job, the cares of daily life receded.
Our aged cherry trees had thick trunks. Their branches hung low, making picking from the ground easier. The Latino crew we hired to harvest arrived early to cook breakfast before work. The smell of tortillas and onions greeted us as we came down to start the day. These men worked hard but still had time for animated conversation and jokes, and the sounds of their lively camaraderie filled the air. Each picker worked with a two-gallon aluminum bucket, a harness, and a wooden ladder. After the cherries were dumped into large wooden totes, we loaded them on our truck and took them to the brine plant at the end of the picking day.
Delivering handpicked cherries was a ritual of its own. After I got proficient driving our twenty-foot flatbed truck, I would make the trip with one of the kids—Alex always wanted to come—and our dog, Bagel, who was willing to go anywhere as long as she could ride. Thirty totes, three layers of ten totes each, put our truck at its maximum load. I tied the cargo down and drove slowly to avoid sudden stops.
During the peak of harvest, there would be a string of trucks at the cannery at the end of the day, waiting to be unloaded and sampled. Small pickups, straining under the weight of one tote, alternated with large flatbed trucks carrying many layers of totes. We sat in the long line, with the doors open to catch the breeze, and waited for our turn. The slow-moving line of trucks laden with fruit moved in a choreographed dance with the fast-wheeling forklifts unloading totes.
Payment depended on how well our cherries fared in the grading, which took place while we watched. The forklift brought several totes over to the grader, who put handfuls from random totes into a small bucket, and then examined each cherry. I held my breath with every one. Perfect cherries with stems went to the drinks-cocktail market, fetched the highest price, and went into pile number one. The second pile was perfect cherries without stems, suitable for the baking market. The third pile was rejects—cherries that were split or showed any rot—for which there was no compensation. My heart sank at every reject. After sorting, the grader weighed each pile, calculated its percentage of our sample, and applied that percentage to our whole load. Growers tried to top-dress their totes, putting the best cherries on top, but the graders knew to dig down to get the samples. During cherry harvest, the cannery stayed open to receive cherries long past dark, often until midnight.
We farmed the cherries longer than the other fruits. In 1987, with relief but also nostalgia, we took out the last cherry trees. Finally, we could give our entire focus to our vineyards. But alas, there was no more grazing in the cherry orchard after dinner.
BILL AND I WERE on a steep learning curve. From the time we cleared our first piece of land in 1971 to building the winery in 1977, everything we did—starting a family, farming orchards, building a house, planting a vineyard, starting the winery—was a new experience. As soon as we put the vines into the ground, we were on an express train, with nature at the wheel. Everything needed our attention at the same time. Life was so full, and moving so fast, that we didn’t have time to reflect on the wisdom of our undertaking. We fell into bed and slept soundly every night, waking only when a baby cried.
My father’s business success in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, enabled him to indulge his love of wine and become our partner in 1974. He invested as soon as he was convinced we were serious about our project. He invested only a bit of cash, but he encouraged us to expand by guaranteeing loans for us at the Milwaukee bank that handled his business. His help was crucial, because local banks thought we were just as crazy as everyone else did and refused to lend money to such a risky project. With my father’s help, we were able to buy adjoining parcels of land as they came up for sale. We benefited from having our vineyards contiguous. On the other hand, financing our operation so completely through debt left us undercapitalized and financially vulnerable, a condition that plagued us for years.
Daddy envisioned a family winery where we could ferment the grapes we grew and craft them into fine wines on our own land and by our own hand. Bill and I, barely able to keep the vineyards and orchards under control, were daunted at the thought of adding a winery. But spurred on by my father, Bill started researching startup costs and building materials and hired a marketing consultant to help estimate income and costs for the first ten years. He hired a winery design consultant to help lay out the winery and select equipment. As Daddy’s enthusiasm grew, he talked my three older brothers into investing.
The next step, getting permission to site a winery on our property, became an unexpected hurdle. The land use regulations we both strongly favored became our stumbling block. Because of his training, Bill was a firm believer in land use planning and didn’t mind having to go to the county planning commission for approval to construct a winery on farm property. Oregon had just buttressed its land use laws, the legacy of Governor Tom McCall, one of the state’s most colorful and well-loved politicians. McCall took a forceful stand on controlling growth that gained national attention. In a CBS interview in 1971, he quipped, “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”
When Governor McCall pushed the Oregon legislature to pass a state land use bill in 1973, mandating that each county decide how the land within its boundaries should be used—what should be designated agricultural, residential, commercial, or industrial—Bill put his planning degree to use by getting involved. His goal was to convince county planners to designate the hillsides where we had vineyards as agricultural, rather than as residential “view property,” which was the route they were headed. Hillside soils, with their lower fertility and excellent drainage, suited wine grapes, and gave the vines natural frost protection because they were a few degrees warmer than the valley floor. The small group of winegrowers worked together to convince the county that vineyards were the wave of the future and the hillsides should be designated agricultural.
The designation of hillsides as agricultural, with twenty- and forty-acre minimums, became vital protection for the wine industry. The efforts of the early winegrowers meant the hillsides in Yamhill County would become dotted with vineyards instead of trailer parks or subdivisions. In neighboring counties, where the growers were less active in shaping the law, hillside housing developments encroached on farms and vineyards as the population of metropolitan Portland expanded.
Oregon entered the twenty-first century as the only state in the nation with a comprehensive land use program. Governor McCall’s land use initiative, Senate Bill 100, passed at an extraordinary time in Oregon’s history, when visionary and strategic politicians from both political parties found a way to work together, thinking of future generations and the betterment of the state. Its implementation coincided neatly with the development of Oregon’s new wine industry.
As we moved ahead with our winery plans and applied for the land use permit, we saw a side of Yamhill County that we had known was there but hadn’t paid much attention to—teetotaling religious fundamentalism. Without our knowledge, a few fervent winery opponents carried around petitions requesting that the county deny our permit. While the petition said nothing about God, religion, or the evils of alcohol, we found out that the leaders of the petition drive were either Mormons or members of the Church of God, a fundamentalist Christian denomination. Both groups were vigorously anti-alcohol. As long as we only farmed, we were accepted into the community. But the winery we were proposing represented something new and threatening. We suddenly found ourselves thrust into the role of outsiders.
Our neighbors’ imaginations ran wild thinking about the terrible possibilities. “Do you want drunks from the winery roaming the hills?” the petition carriers would ask their neighbors. They mentioned rape. “Our homes and women wouldn’t be safe.” Petitioners asked their neighbors to imagine the flashing neon signs that would undoubtedly be on top of our winery to attract people off the highway a quarter mile away. In sum, a winery would be a blight
