I've spent the last 15 years staring at the most gorgeous fig tree outside of my office at Mounts Family Winery in Healdsburg, Ca. It was planted nearly 50 years ago next to where our winery is today. As the story goes, my husband's great uncle Jack Giusto came over with a cutting from his own tree planted in Daly City, Ca. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of this tree. Every season the fruit
came and went untouched (you have no idea how guilty I feel about this today). One day, I picked a few figs and took my first bite of one. It was like my soul became one with this fig tree! From that point on, I sought out to make this piece of earth’s jewel stand out in my own small way. Over the years I’ve made several, and I mean at least three dozen attempts to make the perfect fig jam. I created a recipe that was good and stuck with it for a few years but I never had that “lick the jar clean” experience until last year. Last year, bored with my recipe, I started looking through our liquor cabinet to see what I could use to spice up the recipe. Being in the wine biz, we have a pretty decent wine collection but our liquor cabinet is not so sophisticated. We have bottles of spirits that have been sitting up in that cabinet collecting dust, untouched for years. As I was rummaging through the old cabinet I found a small bottle of bourbon that my husband received as a gift many years ago while working for a local winery (Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards). I didn't know it at the time but apparently it was a very expensive bottle that was quite sentimental to him ……………well, as you probably guessed, I used it for my fig jam!! I felt bad, sort of! My sweet, handsome, (tired) hubby came home from a long day of harvesting grapes and making wine and found the empty bottle next to what he lovingly calls my “figgy project” (aka, “great, no dinner and a sink full of pots and pans!). You can imagine how the evening unfolded! I said, “Honey, we don’t even drink bourbon”…………the new recipe was here to stay and the rest is history! So here I am now in 2014 with one of the biggest fig harvests I’ve had to date. I’m up to 150 jars bottled and hoping the weather stays warm enough to ripen another 8 – 16 lbs of fruit so that I can jar up another 2 - 3 dozen. I am completely obsessed with this tree, stalking it daily, checking to see if the next rounds of figs are ripe enough to pick. Even on those long, laborious days of grape harvesting/crush and running the taxi cab service for my three kids to get them to cheer, soccer and football, I am secretly waiting for the last precious hours of my day to stand over a steaming pot of fig jam, stirring and stirring and stirring. Seems crazy, yes actually I am crazy but it brings me so much joy and satisfaction when, at breakfast I can top off the kids creamed cheese bagels or pancakes with fig jam or better yet put a jar in my, “A Few of My Favorite things” gift basket to give to a special friend. The smile on their faces light me up! You are probably wondering why I chose to name this company Butterfly Fig Farms? In the early spring the buds burst open on the branches of this 50 year old tree and the leaves sprout up into wings. It looks like a hundred butterflies are perched out in front of my office window. Every single time, it makes me stop what I’m doing and stare at this glorious tree for a good long time and I begin to wonder……….what am I going to do with these magnificent jewels called figs??
