In October, during harvest, the vineyard starts the day shrouded in mist. Viewed from the vineyard’s highest point, only the tops of the tallest Douglas firs poke through, reminding me of a Japanese landscape painting. In the foggy wetness the pickers start, breaking the dew-covered spiderwebs that stretch across the rows. By noon, the day will be gloriously sunny, with the crispness in the air that is autumn.
In winter I see the skeleton of the vineyard, the trunks and canes of the vines stark without their leafy cover. Its austerity is striking, whether cloud-shrouded and bleak with rain, or snow-covered and glaringly bright. The vines sleep a long time, from December to April. By then I am eager for the vineyard to come alive. My heart sings as the swollen buds start to unfurl into tender green leaves, pink-hued around the edges. Baby clusters emerge with tendrils like tiny curls. The birds start nesting again. The air feels soft. What will this season bring? It could be a great year. A farmer’s hope is always highest in the spring.
Each new vineyard year starts in the winter, when the vines are dormant, with our crew pruning away most of the previous year’s growth. It is done in January, February, and March, when the weather is miserable—pouring rain, cold and windy, or just gray. Layers of long underwear and flannel underneath yellow rain pants and slickers, rubber boots and fingerless wool gloves completed the well-dressed pruner’s look.
During my years in the vineyard, pruning season was one of the most sociable times, despite the fact that it took place during the worst weather of the year. In addition to our own small crew, I hired three or four extra people each winter to help.
On rainy days, we would prune with our hoods up and our heads down, each in our own row, with only the sound of the loppers breaking the silence. But when the rain stopped, we would throw back our hoods and the conversation and singing would start.
At noon we would sit in the vineyard office—the basement of our house—while we dried off and warmed up, the ambrosia of wet rain gear, tuna sandwiches, corn chips, and fresh oranges permeating our conversation. Someone had given me a book called Totally Tasteless Jokes and we took turns reading it. The jokes were pathetic and we mostly moaned at them, but then one would strike us as hilariously funny and the laughter felt good. Occasionally—just often enough to keep us from rain-induced depression—the sun came out and the whole world looked different: blue sky, bright sunshine, and snow-covered Mount Hood looming over the vineyard, its majestic peak alternately tinged with pink, gold, or blue. What a glorious feeling to be working outside! How lucky we were to be working in the vineyard! We strode up the rows more boldly and sang louder on those days.
SOON AFTER I STARTED in the vineyard, we witnessed Mother Nature’s stunning power. On the morning of May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force that sent a plume of ash fifteen miles into the air and created the largest landslide in recorded history. A wall of logs and mud flowed down leveling everything in its path—forests, homes, roads, bridges, wildlife—and leaving miles of desolation blanketed in gray ash.
It was a Sunday and the five of us had been to a birthday brunch for Bill at his parents’ home in Tigard, about seventy-five miles from Mount Saint Helens. Shortly after leaving their home, we saw the effects of the eruption. We sat in the car at the top of a hill and watched in awe as the mountain sent up a huge, roiling cloud of ash. The actual explosion surprised everyone, although the possibility of an eruption had been in the news for weeks. We had watched endless television interviews with people forced to evacuate their homes. Those who refused to leave vanished without a trace. Ash drifted far beyond the area desolated by the eruption. In Portland, the gray dust clung to grass and shrubs for months. A thin layer of ash even landed on our vineyard, but it barely covered our hillside and didn’t cause any harm. We drove to Hillsboro, northwest of us, where the ash was almost an inch deep, and Nik and Alex gathered it in buckets to keep as souvenirs. Then they got the bright idea of putting it in little bags to sell to tasting-room visitors. They sold out so I never had to deal with buckets of leftover volcanic ash. Local farmers plowed in the ash, the crops suffered no harm, and the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens took its place in local lore next to the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
We did many experiments in the vineyard and the one for which I had the highest hopes turned out to be our biggest failure. We got the idea of using geese in the vineyard when we heard they were used to weed the fields at mint farms—they ate the weeds and left the mint. I envisioned a pastoral scene with fat, happy geese wandering around the vineyard, feasting on weeds and leaving the vines to grow healthy and lush. Here was an idea that had everything going for it. It was more environmentally friendly than spraying herbicide or running equipment to mow or till, and it would save time and money. We chose a block of vines that we could fence relatively easily—three acres of Riesling adjacent to our house. We could watch the geese from our deck.
There were some immediate obstacles. We needed to fence, but we also needed to get a tractor up and down the rows to spray for mildew and botrytis (rot). We met this challenge with a makeshift chicken wire fence that had to be removed when we needed to spray, which was every ten to fourteen days all summer. But we figured all this extra time and energy was a small price to pay for such a great idea.
Two dozen white Chinese goslings arrived at our house in March. I had never had any farm animals and couldn’t wait. When we opened the box, forty-eight tiny bright eyes looked up and gave us little goose smiles, accompanied by considerable twittering. We bonded immediately. They were so little that we put them in a small pen until they got bigger and we got the fencing in place. They came waddling, honking eagerly, whenever they saw or heard us. We chuckled at their antics.
In April, when the vines had not fully leafed out but the grass and weeds were growing fast and at their tender and tasty best, we embarked on our great experiment. As far as we knew, no other vineyard in Oregon had even thought of trying this. We put the geese in among the vines, in a section that has been known since as the Goosepen Block. The young geese loved their new freedom and wandered around giving all the various plants the taste test. I expected they would develop a taste for the leafy weeds. The vines would be too high for them to reach, anyway.
Our plan started to fall apart right away. The geese just wanted to be near us. When we went out onto the deck to see how they were doing, they’d come running over and line up along the fence, honking at us. When we weren’t outside, they would sit quietly at the fence and wait for us to reappear. I tried going into the vineyard and showing them the far reaches of the block. They dutifully allowed me to herd them, and then they went back to their positions along the fence line facing our house. We thought maybe the geese would cover more of the block after they had eaten all the weeds in the section near the house. It never happened. They spent the rest of their lives trying to be near us, while the weeds grew freely. We knew it was time to act when the young geese got big enough to reach the grapes hanging on the vines.
In the end, we chose one pair to keep, and the rest of the geese ended up in our freezer. I cooked one, but we couldn’t bear to eat it. They stayed in the freezer for years. I was simply unable to bring myself to deal with them. It wasn’t until we moved, and I had to empty the freezer, that I finally closed the chapter on the geese—except, that is, for the two goose-down pillows that Bill had given me for Christmas. For many years we laid our heads on the fluffy remains of our unwilling weed eaters.
The pair that we kept, dubbed Papa Goose and Gertie, grew large and elegant. At first, they hung out in the front yard and liked to camp on the front doormat. The whole front porch was soon awash in goose poop. Not good. We fenced an area off our deck that became their pasture, then built a little pond and a house for them. I even bought a series of exotic ducks to keep Papa and Gertie company.
Our most successful vineyard experiment was far less glamorous: testing various grasses as potential cover crops between the grape rows to prevent erosion. Ours was one of a handful of vineyards that worked with the US Soil Conservation Service and Oregon State University to test a variety of perennial and annual grasses. We later learned that the level of cooperation between these two groups for this project