Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to go away for the Thanksgiving holidays, or to be free for shopping or whatever we felt like doing. It wasn’t an option. Wine Country Thanksgiving was too important to our business, so we made it a family event and tried to make it fun. In the early years, Bill’s mother, Grandma Betty, took charge of the tasting room kitchen, which was separated from the main space by a long counter on which she kept a large coffee urn for nondrinkers and designated drivers. She was adept at chatting with visitors while attending to her main job, slicing French bread to go with the cheese on the food platters. Tired of arm cramps from slicing baguettes to feed the increasing crowd, she showed up with a gift for the winery—an electric bread slicer. Bill’s father, Grandpa John, helped pour wine, stopping occasionally to chat with former patients who were delighted to see one of their favorite doctors. Usually they wanted to hang out at John’s table and talk, and we had to rescue him to keep the tasting line from backing up.
Nik, Alex, and Alison did whatever they were able to do, making change at the admissions table as soon as they were old enough, and later, when they were older and stronger, restocking wine, washing glasses, and carrying cases out for customers. Before we had a full-time bookkeeper, we made a custom each night of counting the day’s take. We brought the small gray metal cash box home and gave the kids the honor of doing the counting. They sat on the floor in the living room and learned, at an early age, how to put the bills in order, all facing the same way, how to count the change, arrange the credit card receipts, and fill out the cash-box records.
We were always on the lookout for vineyard or winery projects we could tackle as a family so the kids could be involved. One year Grandma Betty showed us an advertisement in a Christmas catalog for a package of shredded grapevines to be used as smoke flavoring for the grill. She brought it as a curiosity, but teenage Nik seized on the idea, and NGB (his initials) Enterprises was born. He tackled the production side, and I agreed to help with the packaging. We would sell it in the tasting room.
Production started that February, as Nik and Alex (NGB Enterprises’ first employee) pulled the vine prunings out of the vineyard rows. They kept the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay separate and transported the big piles of prunings down to the shed to dry out. Nik used the money he earned working at the winery to buy a shredder to shred the prunings to the right consistency. The shredded prunings, which we called Grapevine Smoke, dried in wooden totes until the family (free labor) could get together to bag, seal, and label our new product.
I got carried away designing the packaging. I pictured people grilling with Pinot Noir Grapevine Smoke and then drinking Pinot Noir with their meal, so I decided to package the smoke and the wine together, in a two-bottle wine box. This required putting the new product in a long, narrow, special-order plastic bag that, when filled, would be about the size of a wine bottle. And if there was to be a card for the directions (simple: soak in water before putting over the coals on the grill), why not print recipes on the other side? I found a woman to create recipes for both the Pinot Noir and the Chardonnay. When she tried out the two different Grapevine Smoke samples, she called to say, “I never would have guessed how striking the taste difference was between the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay smoke. It’s amazing!”
The final step was to have a colorful label designed and printed. I spent more time on this project than I had intended and did all the running around, since Nik wasn’t old enough to drive. But I enjoyed the challenge. We sold the individual bags in the tasting room and made up gift boxes with the wine and matching Grapevine Smoke.
The next year we decided to offer our new product to Norm Thompson, a Portland catalog company whose slogan was Escape from the Ordinary. Nik and I visited the Norm Thompson headquarters to pitch the new package we had devised—a slatted wooden crate containing one bag each of Pinot Noir Grapevine Smoke and Chardonnay Grapevine Smoke shrink-wrapped so that the products, labels, and recipe cards were clearly visible. To our delight, their buyer loved it and ordered one thousand boxes.
We had made only a hundred bags of each type of Grapevine Smoke the first year, but Nik and I jumped at the chance to be in the prestigious Norm Thompson catalog, and ignored the logistics of increasing production by a factor of ten. Production went into high gear. Every weekend the extended family gathered in the equipment shed to tackle the mounds of shredded, dried grapevine prunings. As the rain pounded on the metal roof, we ran our little assembly line and managed to keep our good humor, as long as we could see progress. I applied our fancy self-stick labels to the plastic bags, then Grandma Betty, Grandpa John, and Nik, in white dust masks, filled them with the Grapevine Smoke. Bill ran the temperamental hot sealer to close the bags. Alex put the bags in the crates so they could go to Portland for shrink-wrapping. Alison was too little to do much but play and get in the way. The final product was impressive and we were proud to see it in the catalog. Nik made enough money to buy himself a used car. But that was the end of the Grapevine Smoke caper. Nobody was willing to do it again.
Growing up around the winery meant a lot of watching Mom and Dad pour wine for customers, talk about the wine, and sell it. Kids are nothing if not imitators, so I guess it was natural for me to want to copy them and sell something to customers, too. Since the cherry trees on our farm happened to be in season, I decided cherries would be what I would sell. The tasting room was open only on weekends, so if I wanted to do this, it would mean giving up watching Saturday morning cartoons, but I decided getting up early to pick the fruit and pack it in the little green pint fruit cartons, ready to sell to customers, would be worth it. I was probably eight years old. I thought I had told Mom what I was planning but she looked surprised when she found me setting up shop at a picnic table outside the tasting room with my baskets of cherries and free samples.
Then, one May when I was nine years old, our local volcano, Mount Saint Helens, spewed ash across the western US. My brother and I took advantage of this opportunity, collected buckets of ash, put it in little plastic baggies, and sold them to visitors as genuine Mount Saint Helens ash souvenirs.
My next venture was “Grapevine Smoke.” Mom had heard about using chopped up grapevines for barbecuing to add smoke flavoring. This ended up being our most complicated venture to date, with recipes, a chopping and bagging operation, and ultimately placement in a catalog for home chefs. The Grapevine Smoke business earned me enough money to buy my first car, after I was old enough to get my driver’s license. The catalog company eventually stopped ordering, I went off to college, and I gave the car to my brother, who I felt had earned it from all his labor helping me.
Nik Blosser
Chairman of the Board, Sokol Blosser Winery
The Newport Seafood and Wine Festival, which took place in the city of Newport on the Oregon coast in February, was another family event. The Newport Chamber of Commerce started the festival in the early 1980s to lure people to the coast during the winter, and we supported it for many years, spending the weekend at a local motel. Bill’s folks went along. John helped us pour wine while Betty entertained the three kids. She took them to the aquarium, the wax museum, and the beach. I know her job was harder than ours. Every morning, before the festival started, all of us went to a local restaurant famous for their poppy-seed pancakes. It was as close to a vacation as we got for many years.