Seasons Among the Vines:
Life Lessons from the California Wine Country
PREFACE (EXCERPT)
A Note from the Farmer
I'm a city-girl-gone-country whose love affair with farming brought me to Glen Ellen, California, to take up a venture I could've only jumped into with the enthusiasm of someone who doesn't quite know what she's getting herself into. For me, grapevines are celebrated weeds much in the way diamonds are treasured rocks. (Indulge me, please. Farming requires a definite, if weird, sense of humor.) This book is an invitation to the reader-nature enthusiast, food and wine lover, bold women and men, backyard gardener, and even those who've never thought about farming--to learn a thing or two about grape-growing and winemaking. Browse-or study-the sidebars interspersed throughout the narrative for interesting facts; you'll learn that growing grapes can be as simple as cultivating weeds, and making wine can be done by just about anyone (the former by those without a green thumb and the latter by those without a culinary degree). You can do this practically anywhere-whether you live in the suburbs of Berkeley or the high-rises of Manhattan. When you open a bottle of wine produced from grapes stomped upon by your family and friends, from fruit lovingly grown on grapevines (weeds) you tended, I predict that your neighbors will talk-wherever they live--and they'll be green with envy.
CHAPTER ONE (EXCERPT)
A Cluster Off the Old Vine
In Sonoma Wine Country, the smells of fall are rich, the air damp and musty. Tourists flock to the valley like children stalking an elusive butterfly, and they stroll through the spellbinding wine towns breathing in the delicious bouquet and inhaling the splendid aromas. Sometimes, if they're lucky, they get a chance to converse with a famous winemaker who might be taking a quick lunch break away from the frenetic pace of harvest. But the most powerful part of our fall season is how the smells make the farmer feel. The pungent scents release feelings of elation and uneasiness; elation from knowing you made it successfully through a year of farming; uneasiness from having to let go of something you have poured your heart and soul into for an entire year.
There's also an energy in the atmosphere that can't be explained. The tourists can feel it, too. They come to witness this electrifying vitality--sipping wine and watching the natives busy themselves with picking grapes and crushing fruit. One can saunter down the street at night and view the buzz of the wineries no matter what time it is: the music is blaring, winery workers are laughing, and everyone is acting as if there is no need to sleep. There is a profoundly intoxicating aura that hypnotizes not just the out-of-town guests, but the natives as well.
After many years of living in the wine country, I've learned that even though every season in farming seems to bring everlasting infatuation abundant with Promethean ideas, hardships, and newfangled lessons, fall is a time of fresh, hopeful beginnings and a brief juncture where I can start over. It's the time to shrug off the past year's mistakes and make amends for my most recent growing failures; it's the moment to enthusiastically chart a new course for becoming a better farmer and an interlude when I can reflect upon the hard-earned knowledge that I've acquired. It's also the time to soak up the last rays of the calming summer sun, take in all the aromatic scents of crush, and romanticize about the future.
My tale starts in the fall because it's the season my family loves the most, and because it was fall when we first moved to the country. When we arrived at our farm ten years ago, my kids were just six, four, and two. I surprised them by erecting a giant, canvas teepee in the front yard. Grace, Dude, and Joy were ecstatic. Placed no more than twenty feet away from our rows of berry-filled grapevines, it stood nearly fifteen feet high, painted with brightly colored animals and dancing Native Americans. Dude saw it first, "Wow, Mom," he screamed, flashing his toothless grin, "Can we sleep in it? Please? Pretty please!" The girls were happy, too. And never mind the house just yet, I thought to myself, although it was spectacular with its ivy-enveloped stone front, and its arbors covered with prolific wisteria and fragrant star jasmine. The teepee was meant to take my children's gaze away from the vast acres of land that might make them feel isolated and overwhelmed. I'd worried that their new home would seem over-powering and frightening and much like being lost in a national forest. But the teepee standing in the open field surrounded by twinkling oak meadows and rows of brilliant fruiting vines made us all feel like we had just nailed the best camping spot in a park over-crowded with nature lovers. As it would turn out, I was in store for a culture shock; my children loved their new home.
I had a dream inherent--or rather a nightmare -that first night we spent in the country. It was like one of those horrible, sweat-filled dreams where you're the center of attention and everyone is laughing and pointing and you don't know why. The dream had that gut-wrenching effect of ridicule, ignorance, panic, and self-doubt. The message was there: I was in over my head living my new life as a farmer.
In the beginning, my weeds-the seven acres of spirited grapevines I acquired by mortgaging my life away-were in need of care by someone who knew more about farming than I did. And no sooner had I passed through the gates of our twenty-four acres of deer-fenced property did I realize I hadn't a clue about how to manage the eight-year-old grapevines we'd inherited. I simply had not accumulated enough knowledge from the quick reading I had done before we packed our things and left the city. The anxiety associated with making a mistake frustrated me. It was as if my vines were nasty children I couldn't control.
Somehow I would have to acquire at least some of the skills that my established, old-time Sonoma neighbor-farmers already had. Many of them came from generations of farming people, while I had only my strong motivation and some technical knowledge I had acquired from reading a couple of viticulture textbooks. When I confronted Chuck with my doubts and fears, he came up with a viable suggestion:
"Why don't you go back to school and study grape-growing?" he said. This suggestion eventually turned into one full year, forty hours a week, of studying about grapes and winemaking. There was a lot to learn then, and a lot to learn now.
Viticulture, the study of how to grow grapes, was a popular subject among farmers, mostly male farmers, at that time, who wanted to exchange their crops for more lucrative crops like grapes, as well as with would-be farmers like myself (also mostly male) who wanted to take a stab at pursuing grape-growing as a new career.
So before I knew it, I was enrolled, full-time, in classes on everything a commercial farmer would need to know about how to grow grapes. The first two classes I registered for dealt with how to operate tractors (the treasured tool of farmers) and soil analysis. The soil class was no problem, but tractor class was another story.
When I walked into the classroom at Santa Rosa Junior College on the first day of viticulture school, it wasn't what I'd expected. Unlike any lecture room I'd experienced, there was dirt and grass on the floor and lots of men wearing plaid shirts, wrangler jeans, and muddy boots. My thoughts flashed on the stereotypes I had held long ago about farmers. The professor wore the same attire as the rest of the students, and he had a slow, country drawl which, surprisingly, relaxed me; I felt immediately intrigued. I'd never had a teacher that seemed so untroubled on the first day of class. He wasn't busily scribbling jargon on a giant chalkboard; instead, he was cheerily conversing with a few of the guys sitting in the front row. I heard them talking enthusiastically about inseminating cows, new and improved pig feeds, and how to put shoes on a belligerent horse. Could I ever be like them, have that kind of knowledge about those types of things? I took a seat in the back of the room hoping to blend in with the group.
As he began his lecture about the benefits of grape-growing, I am certain that many of the students wondered what I was doing there among all those energetic male farmers. I wondered myself. It reminded me of my first job after college when I arrived for work and all of my co-workers were men-men who had formed a strong camaraderie from working together for years.
Would I ever be a "chip off the old block?" Not here, that was for sure. There were no farmers that I knew of-male or female in my family. Sitting in that classroom at Santa Rosa Junior College I experienced that feeling of all eyes on me, everyone wondering if I'd pull my weight and be able to tough it out. This time, though, I was ready for a challenge. I didn't feel ill at ease or intimated; this time I felt empowered. Time had given me omnipotence and the strength to understand that I was following my dream, and I would carry through with those things that were most important to me -no matter how much I stuck out.
But because my city upbringing had not provided me with tractor finesse, and I knew absolutely nothing about how to use one, I found the curriculum on how to purchase, drive, and maintain a tractor extremely difficult. In fact, my worst grade in viticulture school came from tractor class. While I struggled to learn the basic engine parts, my classmates, enthusiastic younger-thanme men who had spent their youth dabbling in tractors, cars, and whatever other machinery they could locate around the family farm, breezed through the material. I'm of the mind that vehicles of all sorts are a means to an end, and I took no satisfaction from learning how the actual machinery functioned.
My first tractor exam took place in a vacant room filled with three large tables on which lay pieces of every imaginable part of a tractor, disassembled and scattered randomly about. The goal was to identify each part and write the correct name in the corresponding blank space on the test paper. It was like biology class in high school when we dissected frogs and I labeled three of the organs with "liver" because they all looked like the liver my mother used to make us eat. Who was I kidding? How could I cope with these metal objects that lay before me?
I panicked when I looked down at my test results and realized that my answer to five of the questions read "fuel filter."
"Shasta," I said to the student standing next to me, "I'm never gonna make it through this." I had the sense of mind to know that one tractor would not possess five fuel filters. Like an ill prepared law student floundering for words during a mock classroom trial, I dug through my tractor vocabulary searching for creative words to fill in the blanks. They were imaginative all right.
To this day I thank those boys who jabbed me in the ribs with the ends of their pencils and shook their heads in disbelief when they glimpsed my test paper. Luckily, their contorted faces and flapping eyelids managed to wake me up and forced me to push a little deeper into my memory. Somehow, with their assistance, I managed to dig up some fresh mechanical terminology that proved to fit those cold metal pieces that lay before me.
I may have been among the least safe of the students who was finally allowed to mount the tractors, which felt a little like mounting a horse: you need to exercise the same care in flinging yourself over the top without causing yourself to fly off the other side. A true farmer instinctively knows the correct amount of energy it takes to do this. I, on the other hand, had to pour all of my concentration into looking as if I had been doing this my whole life. As we stood in a chilly barn on that very first day of class, the tractor instructor pointed in my direction and snapped, "You--get on the tractor and move it out of the barn." I nearly choked. Could he really mean me? As I turned around to see if the guy behind me was moving to carry out his order, the instructor briskly stomped his booted foot and pointed his finger directly at me. He bellowed, "No! I am talking to you, Missy. Come here and move 'er out!" Sure that he was picking on me because I was the only female, I begrudgingly walked toward the massive tractor trying to muster up the confidence I felt everyone expected.
I wanted to scream out in indignation, Who the hell are you calling missy "anyway? I wanted to kick him where it hurt with my coveted pink cowboy boots that I bought shortly after moving to the country. But knowing full well that this would wipe out my chances of ever gaining the respect of the rest of the farmers in the class, not to mention that it would earn me the first "F" of my life, I gritted my teeth and held on to my anger. My fragile-looking feminine stride scared him, I'm sure, as I swayed my way up to the tractor. Clearly he doubted my ability to carry out his order, but I sensed his doubt and it challenged me to rise to the occasion to make him swallow whatever disdain he hoped to feel at seeing me fail. It took every ounce of pride and fortitude I had to ignore his tough cowboy demeanor and not make up an excuse about why I felt another classmate would be better suited to the task. The last thing I wanted to do was compromise my dream because I was embarrassed about accomplishing something, and because I was concerned about being someone that wasn't what others thought I should be.
I felt myself start to tremble and stopped myself cold, wondering the whole time what the consequences would be if I accidentally removed a barn wall or ran over a classmate's foot while I moved this giant heap of metal out of the dark barn and into the sunlight. I was fighting to prove myself; but more than that I felt like I was fighting for men's respect of women worldwide-a lofty image to pull me through. As I climbed on with my calculated mount, I told myself not to fail simply because of my inability to accept the fact that I might be successful. I had to stop hiding behind my competence. There were nearly twenty men watching with bated breath.
Feigning total confidence, as if I had not a problem in the world, I held my head high, flicked my unloosed hair out of my face, and entered into the sunlight. I could hear hesitant applause arising from the barn behind me. I let out a sigh of relief with the knowledge that there was at least a glimmer of hope that some of those guys actually wanted me to succeed. I didn't have to hide in the back corner of the barn all semester, or worse yet, forever be a passenger on the backside of the tractor. I could be in the driver's seat without anyone giving me orders.
That first day of tractor class seemed like the longest day of my life. Not only did I have to take the mechanical test and move the tractor out of the barn, but afterwards all the students had to cultivate a small piece of acreage into a baseball field. The tractor instructor disappeared briefly just after my first (and only) large vehicle "show," and before I knew it he had spun the tractor around masterfully, coming to a halt in front of me while the rest of the class was assembling outside the barn. I think it was his attempt to prove that he could certainly outmaneuver me on the tractor, and I wasn't challenging that.
Once he had the rest of the students' attention, he was off, whipping down the vineyard rows as the fierce sun beat down onto his face, laughing and gesturing at the wildness of the threehundred-something acres of college-owned farmland, a portion of which we were going to tame. At that moment, the wildness resided not in the land but in his excitement. He planned to create a playing field out of the raw, unkempt earth, and he looked carefree and joyful as he immersed himself and us in the project ahead. I wanted to share his energy and witness the same beauty he saw, even though the Field looked more like a huge weed patch rather than a pristine baseball area. I wanted to feel what he felt and I wanted to believe that all I would need for this was to mount my own Kubota tractor and fly through the rows of my vineyard with the demeanor of a true farmer.
We finished that playing field after a long, hot eight-hour day of swapping two school-owned tractors among twenty students, each of us taking thirty-minute shifts. Our faces were scorched and our bodies were covered with a fine layer of dust that turned into dark droplets of sweat as the day wore on.
But as the hours of that day skipped by I decided to come to terms with the title of "Missy," so eloquently awarded me by my tractor professor. I decided to treat it as a rite of passage and view it as serving a higher cause. After all, wasn't it I who had earned the respect of my colleagues, guys who were patting me on the back as we took our turns on the tractor. Better than that, some of them even wanted to talk to me about some of the moves I had done, wanted to swap maneuvers with a complete rookie. For being one of the longest days of my life, it was certainly also among the most rewarding.
There was nothing mundane about those fall months I spent in tractor class, and even though at times I wondered if my desire to farm was nothing more than a crazy attempt to prove that I could adapt myself to any vocation, I got over those feelings after I became, in the eyes of the cowboys, the "expert" tractor girl. I still didn't understand how all the metal parts fit together, but no one seemed to care. And although the students were expected-as part of their grade-to fix those tractors they were driving for the day, my newfound buddies agreed to help me repair mine in exchange for sharing my special driving techniques. When my tractor would break down in the middle of a grapevine row, a couple of pals would see to it that I got on my way again. They'd jump off their own powerful vehicles and dodge through grapevine rows, crouching so our instructor wouldn't see them on their way to assist me. I laid there on my back watching them work, wondering how envious some of my old business associates would be if they knew what I was doing at that exact moment. I laughed at the idea of some of my women friends from the city seeing me here with two guys fixing my broken tractor while I lay in the middle of a breathtaking vineyard soaking up the spine-tingling California sun. When the job was done, they'd stealthily crawl on all fours so as not to be seen by the teacher, wiping their greasy hands on my shoulder as they passed by. "Fudge," I'd whisper to them, as I spit on my arm and wiped the grease away. I felt like "one of the guys." That same fall I was also enrolled in a soil class. We mostly had lectures in the schoolroom, but sometimes we would head to the vineyards of local wineries on a school bus painted light green, the Martha Stewart green that would become popular years later. We attracted attention from police, winery workers, and pedestrians who thought our bus resembled a border-control vehicle. This caused us more than a few delays, and a few kicks for the students who were there to fill an elective slot. It meant less learning time and more entertainment. We were questioned, suspiciously stared at, and casually detained, giving us a taste of what convicts might feel like riding in a prison bus on their way to work the fields.
The driver of our bus was the infamous Professor Richard Thomas. The well-loved Sonoma County native, who has taught viticulture to thousands of farming students and whose license plate reads DR VINE, is a supremely knowledgeable viticulturist and brilliant guy who cracks spicy jokes and has a heart of gold. It's estimated that nearly seventy percent of the vineyards in Sonoma County have been planted by former Thomas students. He took his job very seriously, making sure that the viticulture students realized the impact their farming mistakes would have on our society. And his tests were brutal, requiring knowledge of every word he said during class verbatim, jokes included, to ensure the serious students wouldn't miss any of his class time.
Thomas had this advice about life: "If it's not fun, don't do it," and it's made more and more sense to me as the years have gone on. With his philosophy as our biggest motivation in tow, we usually took a mid-day break surrounded by food and wine that we'd gathered from the Sonoma County winery where we'd been working. Wineries like Dry Creek Vineyards with their Loire-like quality of Sauvignon Blanc, Geyser Peak with their impressive red blends, Sonoma Cutrer with their delicately elegant Chardonnays, and White Oak with their expert winemaking principles, all welcomed the farming students to their different regions in the county - educating, encouraging, and entertaining.