08/11/2026
Next month will bring the first harvest of our estate vineyard, yet the inaugural vintage feels like a homecoming.
We moved here forty years ago when my parents built our home and my dad planted a few rows of grapes as a hobby. The land, at 1,000 feet elevation, was too high to sustain a vineyard for anything more than a bit of fun because the grapes only ripened fully every three years or so in the cool climate of the in those early years.
I moved away after high school and built my life in New York, San Francisco, and Portland, never thinking about returning to my childhood home. After my dad died in an accident, however, my daughter, Gabriella, who was 18 months old at the time, and I moved back to the family property so my mom wouldn't be alone.
A few years in, I noticed that those few rows were getting ripe every year. This is not surprising as climate change has meant that we are picking earlier and are now looking at higher elevation sites. What was impossible before started looking ideal to poise us for the future. I planted what had been a hay field with our estate vineyard of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier.
Now, it's finally coming to bear. It happens to be our twenty-fourth harvest and tenth without my dad, so this feels like moving forward. We're honoring our legacy as we focus on the future. We're able to do this due to your ongoing support and the way you've shared our story. It's not our history- it's ourstory.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-T.S. Eliot
