When we got home, Bill was exhausted and I was still so upset that I rolled Bill’s exercise bike into the living room, hopped on and pedaled as hard as I could, venting the anger I had controlled at the hearing. The personal attack and questions about our morality had hit a nerve. The testimony on religious grounds such as, “I am against the winery because of my Christian family values” implied that because we wanted to start a winery we were immoral. Their condescension and sanctimony infuriated me. Their behavior struck me as very un-Christian. This was my first encounter with outspoken prejudice in the name of God, and it was a rude awakening.
At the commissioners’ hearing two weeks later, the anti-winery faction was back in force. This was their chance to appeal to the three men who had been elected to the Yamhill County Board of Commissioners and had the final say over policy issues. The commissioners listened carefully to their constituents and did not automatically adopt the recommendations of the planning commission. We knew our opponents had a good shot with their appeal. Each person who testified against us presented a picture or map showing how close they lived to the proposed winery and pointed out the dangers they faced—waste and water runoff flowing onto their property, increased traffic driving by their residences, a sinful business corrupting their family life.
But this time we came armed, bringing neighbors and other winery and vineyard people to speak on our behalf. I had eighteen signatures on a petition requesting that any decision by the Board of Commissioners be based on facts, not fears. Most people had signed our opponents’ petition simply because either a neighbor had asked or they were scared by the scenarios the petitioners had described. The small core of people who set out to defeat the winery proposal had stirred up a lot of commotion and I realized I needed to do damage control.
Immediately after the planning commission hearing, while Bill was at work in Portland, I had gone to visit the neighbors to explain what we wanted to do. After my visit, most wanted to stay out of the fight entirely, realizing that our winery would not cause the problems they had been led to believe. By presenting a map showing the locations of neighbors who were opposed, in favor, and neutral, Bill was able to demonstrate that more homeowners in our immediate area were in favor of our application than were opposed. Bill’s quiet dismantling of the opposing testimony contrasted sharply with the emotional, often illogical testimony of those against the winery.
The commissioners, probably baffled by all the turmoil over what seemed a straightforward issue, postponed their decision for two weeks. Finally, they came out in favor of our application for a land use permit. We celebrated, but the fight was not quite over. The hard core of the opposition appealed the county’s decision to the courts, throwing us into a quandary. We had been waiting for resolution before starting construction. If we waited until the appeal wended its way through the courts, we would not have the winery ready for the 1977 crush. We were pretty sure the courts would uphold the county’s decision, but what if they didn’t? We decided to take the risk. When a court decision in our favor finally put an end to the long, emotional battle, we could move full steam ahead.
Our experience paved the way for future wineries; the county made the establishment of a winery on land with a minimum number of vineyard acres an outright permitted use, on the assumption that a winery facility was needed to process the fruit. Later wineries did not have to face the same kind of opposition that we did.
Once the winery was built and the neighbors saw their fears were groundless, they took pride in it. Within fifteen years, the wine industry had gained sufficient status that land that had cost eight hundred dollars an acre when we started was selling for as much as fifteen thousand dollars an acre. Soon after that, it more than doubled and is still rising. The same people who fought us started actively promoting their properties as vineyard land, with premium price tags. Years later, in exquisite irony, the poorly producing wheat fields Howard Timmons fought to protect from the wine business sold for a bundle to become high-value vineyards.
On October 10, 1977, the day finally came when our first block of grapes was ready to pick and we could start the winery’s first vintage. Our twenty-person crew started at seven in the morning and didn’t stop to eat until they finished, working as if they’d each had a shot of adrenaline. Wielding curved knives with wooden handles and leather wrist straps, they grasped the grape clusters and cut the stems with swift, short strokes.
In the quiet early morning, as the picking began, the only sound was the clusters thudding into empty buckets. As the pickers got into a rhythm, the noise level rose. Soon the air was alive with the sounds of pickers running and shouting to each other, grapes sloshing into the totes, tractors chugging back and forth. Each picker had two plastic five-gallon pails, and each time he emptied them into the wooden tote at the end of the row the contractor gave him a ticket to turn in for pay. The pickers ran, even with full pails, shouting their numbers to the contractor, stuffing their tickets into their pants, hustling back to pick. The contractor barked instructions and warnings (in Spanish): “Don’t pick so many leaves! Fill your buckets to the top! Pick the whole vine! You’re leaving too many clusters on the back side!” The pickers were mostly men, but some women came, and a few brought children who hung around with their parents. Pickers sometimes missed whole vines or skipped clusters that were hard to reach. I didn’t want to waste a single grape of our first vintage and walked up and down the rows with a bucket picking the fruit they had overlooked.
We tried to sort the grapes as they went into the totes, taking out the leaves and any clusters that looked underripe or diseased. Most of the time I stood at the totes with the contractor to monitor the picking. Ted Wirfs brought his tractor to help our vineyard foreman, Wayne, lay out the totes in the morning, and then ferry them to the winery as they were filled. Nik and Alex, then six and three, were in on the excitement; I had hired a babysitter to be with them so they could participate in our first vintage. Clad in rubber boots, blue jean jackets, and baseball caps, they watched big-eyed.
One by one, over the course of the month, the other blocks of grapes ripened too. The dark purple, small-clustered Pinot Noir grapes went directly from the stemmer-crusher into large, open-topped wooden vats to ferment. Three times a day, Bob McRitchie, our wine-maker, and Bill took turns standing on a wooden plank laid across the top of the open fermenter, to punch down the cap of grape skins that had risen to the top. To do this they had created a tool—an inverted dog dish attached to a long piece of PVC pipe.
When fermentation was complete, they pumped the Pinot Noir back into the press and pressed the juice off the skins. Then the young wine went into small French oak barrels for aging.
We finished harvesting our Chardonnay and Riesling, the last of the grapes, on October 22. By then we were starting the picking day bundled up against the cold. The fall rains were threatening to settle in for the duration. But the grapes for our first vintage were safely in.
Deciding what to call our new winery turned out to be surprising difficult. I was certain there was a perfect name that would call out to customers in wine shops and make them want to grab our bottles off the shelf. We just had to will that name into our consciousness. We thought of names that highlighted local towns, the hillsides, the vines, the river, the creeks. Nothing had the right magic. I concluded we simply weren’t creative enough. The marketing consultant Bill had hired consoled us. This winery was our baby, he said. Giving it our family names would let potential customers know that real people were involved. “Remember that slogan for lacy women’s bras? ‘Behind every Olga, there’s an Olga’? Put your names on the line—both your names, since you’re equal partners.”
So Sokol Blosser it was. After all, we told ourselves, Orville Redenbacher, the popcorn king, and Smucker’s, the jam people, had used their odd family names. That didn’t keep them from being successful. We could do it too. Bill’s friends teased him about putting my name first, but it was the right marketing decision. We were going to use the initials SB as part of our winery logo.
Once we had our name, we engaged a Portland graphic artist, Clyde Van Cleave, whose work we liked, to design a wine label for us, which we used, with only color modifications, for the next twenty years. The label was about three inches by three inches, with a rounded top that arched over the SB logo. Later, the black and brown lettering on textured beige paper seemed drab, but at the time we thought