I have always been jealous and amazed by winemakers’ origin stories that begin with something similar to: “when I was growing up wine was a part of everyday life. It was on the table with every home-cooked meal with family and friends.” as much as I have grown to love and embrace the idea of wine with breakfast (Cristal in the morning before you have your tea is a religious experience) the truth is that I came from a family that just were not drinkers. Well, edit that. My extended family were legendary consumers of beer from beautiful Aurora, Illinois, but it just wasn’t a part of life with my immediate family. My father always had a bottle of jack daniels in the kitchen and I’m pretty sure it took him more than a year to finish it.
So, I will begin my own origin story about how I came to decide that wine was going to be my life. Like many respectable boys from the midwest my introduction to drinking was provided by a grizzled, gruff, grumpy guadalcanal Marine veteran who for years after the war had built homes with his father’s construction company. He was a cantankerous, doting grandfather who shared his can of old style beer, a sofa in a bright sun room, and the cubs game on WGN. Each day for lunch my grandmother would make us chipped beef on toast - otherwise known as “shit on a shingle" although my grandma didn’t use that word so she called it “SOS”. So, now that I think about it my origin story is not terribly different if you substitute old style for a bottle of wine.
anyway, there really is not much more in the development of my knowledge of alcoholic beverages until I became a teenager and was ceremoniously introduced to keystone light - or something like that, who can say. I remember the first time I had wine with dinner. It was at a girlfriend’s house and her parents had a big sit down dinner. They opened a bottle and I tried it by mimicking everyone else at the table. It tasted like, wine I guess. The father quickly declared that it had gone to vinegar and he quickly fetched another bottle. I don’t remember tasting the difference.
Anyway, skip ahead to Seattle. While I attended the University of Washington I worked in restaurants and I liked to think that i was learning a little bit about wine. In reality it was just enough to fool some of the guests into thinking that I had a clue. It wasn’t until I worked at Cafe Campagne that I really began to become enthralled with and enticed by wine. the sommelier there - shawn Mead - was a magnificent mentor to me, as she was to many people. She helped me along at the onset of my studies of wine. I began to drink wine at home, with meals, with friends, just like a someday-to-be winemaker was supposed to. I began to add to my catalogue of knowledge favorite regions, grape varieties, and producers. I added to my library of memories of where I was when I drank that bottle of 1996 Adelsheim Pinot Noir and who served it to me (it was Mia at the Pink door), The time Pierre Trimbach opened a bottle of 70 year old Riesling for a group of us. The place my old best friend Shauna and I would drink asti spumante, not because it was ironic, but because it was fun and we liked it. The first Christmas I drank Cristal for breakfast. Wine is the memory of experience. Don’t get me wrong I have memories of doing shots of whisky and yelling at the bears game as well, but the act of sharing a bottle of wine (or sitting alone quietly with one) has its own intimate richness that is unique, It takes time and it changes from the first taste to the last.
When I moved home to Chicago I became a sommelier myself and put together some great wine lists. I studied a lot and dove deeply into wine and the world that surrounded it. The tastings and sponsored trips and piling into Pops for Champagne at night with 10 other sommeliers. It was the countless opportunities to experience very rare wine and the pleasure of meeting many people behind the wine. I thought myself to be a rather cool somm (like we all do) but working in hospitality was growing old and I was looking for a way out. Let’s be honest, nearly every sommelier is looking for a way to stay in the wine business but in a way that gets them off the dining room floor. For me that meant looking into the prospect of making wine. After a two hour counseling by Robert Brittan which amounted to: skip school, get a cellar job, go into debt buying fruit and barrels and whatnot, and boom, you’re a winemaker.
Plans to move to Portland began to come together almost immediately. It was not until moving to Portland to work in the cellar with Luisa Ponzi that I truly knew that wine would be my life, but not on the stage of a dining room floor. After one harvest at Ponzi I knew that there would never be anything else that I wanted to do. Winemaking takes a lot of the theory of wine to which I devoted many years and places it into a setting of manual labor, craftsmanship, shakey financial ground, and a lot of waiting. THere are not too many trades where it is the norm not to be able to send off a product to market for years. at the time of my first vintage - 2013 - my new career was filled with constant second guessing my ability to make great wine. Sometimes still I second guess myself and it can be frustrating and axiety-inducing, but there is still nothing i would rather do.
That’s the why in a nutshell.
What’s up with the jeep? Well, that’s Billy. He’s a 1992 Forest Service Jeep Cherokee and I’ve had him for over 20 years and over time he has become somewhat synonymus with me. He has over 250k miles, 8 chicago winters, 5 trips to burning man under his belt. He’s been from Seattle to Key west and many places in between - A fine life. He might have a bit of rust, but he runs perfectly. WHen I started my brand in 2013 I struggled with what to call my wines and what to put on the label. After months of failed ideas I decided to put my name on the bottle along with an image of Billy. He doesn’t get driven all that much anymore, but I just cannot imagine letting him go.
