My goal was to find a grass that would prevent erosion, would not compete with the vines for water since we didn’t irrigate, and would be stalwart enough to withstand equipment driving over it. From among the eight different perennial grasses we tried, we identified a sheep fescue called Covar that did all those things and, in addition, never grew more than four inches high. I sowed that wonderful little grass as a cover crop on our whole vineyard, as did many other farmers.
The US Soil Conservation Service recognized my work in 1984 by honoring Sokol Blosser as Cooperator of the Year for the Yamhill Soil and Water Conservation District. We were to be recognized and presented a plaque at the annual awards dinner. Bill and I both went to the dinner, but I might as well have been invisible. People looked right past me and came over to congratulate Bill and ask him about Sokol Blosser’s project. They assumed the farmer and decision maker was the man, as of course it usually was among the local farmers.
Before and during harvest, it was always a challenge to keep the wild birds away. Cedar waxwings and robins especially loved the ripening grapes. Cedar waxwings move in large flocks, flying like a squadron of small planes. Their elegant descent on the vineyard, in perfect formation, belied the damage they were about to do. I admired their grace and they were easy to scare, so it was hard to dislike them. Robins were a different story. Plump and wily, robins acted alone rather than in flocks, but there were many of them in the vineyard, and they were voracious grape eaters. They would hide in the leafy canopy when they saw us, and then go back to eating when we had gone. When I walked the vineyard with our dogs, Bagel and Muffin, they always took it as a personal affront when they saw birds in the vines and took off after them, barking ferociously. But even their most energetic efforts did not solve the problem.
We had tried everything else to warn off the birds: driving the pickup around honking the horn, riding bikes down the rows and yelling, tying a helium balloon with a picture of a hawk to a trellis wire, turning on an electronic device that emitted bird distress calls, even shooting an air cannon.
Air cannons now operate off propane canisters, but they were more elaborate and difficult in the early days of our vineyard. Water dripping on carbide rocks in a sealed chamber created acetylene gas. When enough pressure was built up, a lever would cause a wheel to strike a flint to ignite the gas and create a giant “kaboom.” They were not reliable and had to be checked often. Maintaining those cannons meant working on hands and knees in the mud during Oregon’s rainy fall season. Bill would light them in the mornings before he left for work and I would keep them going during the day.
I had just finished pounding posts for our new plantings and as I returned to the equipment shed, little Alison ran out to greet me. This remains one of my favorite mother-daughter photos.
I hated and feared guns, but finally I learned to shoot a shotgun to scare the birds; it was the only thing that seemed to work. In the early morning and in the late afternoon, the birds’ feeding times, I’d go out with my shotgun and my ear protection in our little off-road vehicle called a Hester ag truck. A cross between a four-wheel ATV and a golf cart, it had big knobby tires to traverse the vineyards, a bench seat so two people could ride, and a three-foot-square bed behind the seat for supplies. When Alison was little, we went into the vineyard to scare birds every morning after the boys got on the school bus. I bundled her up and she sat in the supply compartment, holding on to the sides with both hands. We bounced up and down the vineyard rows, two fearless females protecting our crop. When it was time to stop and shoot, I put big earmuff protectors on her and popped the shotgun a few times. The birds left unscathed but the noise scared them and I had the satisfaction of doing something about the bird problem.
Harvest season is always the most stressful time of year. The birds can eat the whole crop, the weather is changeable, and I am acutely aware that the future of the wines hinges on my picking decisions. Every year has its own twists and turns, but when I think of harvests, my mind always jumps to the disaster of 1984—the harvest from hell.
That year an unusually cold and wet spring had delayed bloom until mid-July, almost a month late, so we knew harvest would also be later than normal. We would have to depend on Oregon’s classic Indian summer to finish the ripening process. In early October, I walked the vineyard monitoring the grapes. Plump Pinot Noir clusters hung in neat rows along the fruiting canes. They had turned purple, the first sign of ripening, but they were still tart and did not yet have the taste I knew they could acquire. We needed at least two more weeks of good weather to achieve the quality we needed. We never got it.
The rain started a week later and seemed like it would never stop. As the cold gray rain pelted the vineyard, I sat inside, frustrated, helpless, and miserable. I tried to keep myself busy, but all I could do was look out the window and worry, hoping that the next day Indian summer would arrive. I passed the time by baking, then eating, cookies: chocolate chip, butterscotch chip, oatmeal. Between the rain and my overeating, I was a colossal grouch.
After a week of heavy precipitation, it finally stopped; I went out to inspect the damage. A rain-forest dampness hung in the foggy air. The ground was so soggy that I knew we couldn’t get a tractor into the vineyard; it would have slid around on the hillside. The grapes tasted watery, their flavor diluted. The forecast was for more rain. I couldn’t believe it. What had happened to our Indian summer? We had always wondered which season was most critical and the consensus had been that they were equal in importance. The harvest of 1984 showed us that one season mattered most: Oregon’s typically long, warm autumn was the secret to its great grapes.
After agonizing whether to act now or take a chance the weather would improve, I decided to pull in the harvest. When we brought in the Pinot Noir, it had absorbed so much water it was almost 40 percent heavier than we had forecast. Then, the storm began again and we had to harvest the Chardonnay in the rain. I felt apologetic for the pickers who had to slosh uphill to the ends of the rows toting two buckets full of grapes, over thirty pounds each since we couldn’t get the tractor onto the steep slope at the lower end of the rows. We paid them extra to pick under those terrible conditions, and our picking contractor had boxes of fried chicken for his crew when they finished.
The wine reflected the watery harvest. Since vintage-dating a wine (vintage records the year the grapes were picked) denotes a more premium wine, we decided to declassify the wine by producing only a nonvintage Pinot Noir that year. This was our way of letting people know we didn’t think the wine was good enough to deserve vintage dating. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach every year that we get rain in September. A disaster like 1984 is always just a rainstorm away. When the sky is dark gray and the rain is coming down steadily, it’s hard to imagine sunny weather returning. But it always has, except for that one year, wedged in between the two stellar vintages of 1983 and 1985. The memory reminds me how dependent on Mother Nature we are.
I worked enthusiastically with my vineyard crew for the 1980s. We farmed the vineyard and the orchards, and planted more acres of grapes when we took the orchards out. We created a wine grape nursery and sold our grape cuttings to new vineyards arriving in the valley. We researched cover crops, pruning, trellising, and canopy management. With all that attention, the farm became profitable for the first time by the end of the decade, twenty years after we started.
IN THE EARLY 1980s, when our small group of local wineries decided to band together to form the Yamhill County Winery Association, our first joint project was for each of us to host an open house at our winery during the three days after Thanksgiving. The weekend became a wine country tradition, copied later by county winery groups all over the state.
The original nine wineries (Adelsheim, Amity, Arterberry, Chateau Benoit, Elk Cove, Erath, Eyrie, Hidden Springs, and Sokol Blosser) advertised together in Portland, Salem, and Seattle newspapers to lure people out to wine country. People were glad to get out of the house and show off Oregon’s newest industry to visiting friends and relatives. As the number of participating wineries grew, so did the number of visitors and the popularity