Portland Oregonian
| Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) September 12, 2004ON THE NORTHWEST VINE CHILD OF VINEYARD RECALLS PIONEER '70S Author: KATHERINE COLE - Special Writer, The OregonianEdition: SUNRISE Section: LIVING Page: L13 Estimated printed pages: 3Article Text:Summary: Kerry McDaniel Boenisch describes the early wine-making community in the Red Hills above DundeeIn 1973, after selling their family's former chicken-processing plant in McMinnville to a fellow by the name of David Lett, Jim and Donna Jean McDaniel decided there might be something to this winemaking business Lett had launched. So they purchased and planted three vineyard sites in the Red Hills above Dundee, building a house on the property that is today the Torii Mor Winery.Their daughter Kerry was 8 at the time, the youngest of four siblings. "I lived with my parents, two cairn terriers, a Lhasa apso and a lot of red dirt in my grandparents' former travel trailer," Kerry McDaniel Boenisch writes in her new book, "Vineyard Memoirs" (CKMD, $19.95, 112 pages), which includes her memories of those heady days along with recollections of other vineyard-owning families. "It certainly was not a scene from 'Falcon Crest.' "As harvest season approaches, I caught up with McDaniel Boenisch to find out what Septembers and Octobers were like back before the Willamette Valley was known as wine country, and how harvests have changed over the years. Describe harvests in the 1970s. There were fewer plants, and they were farther apart. It took you a lot longer when harvesting to walk up and down the rows. It was very hit and miss. Sometimes we had abundant fruit. Sometimes it rained, and we lost it all before we could pick it. In our very first harvest, it was just our family. My dad had a flatbed truck he backed up to the end of the rows. My grandparents were in their 70s, my brother was 18, then there was my 16-year-old sister and myself. We'd all go out in our boots with our pruning shears and start harvesting. The difference between then and now is we didn't have a crew. Your descriptions in the book of working in the vineyard as a 13-year-old are quite entertaining. Getting up at 4:30 in the morning, there was no sense of, "I am doing something incredibly romantic." I was irritated and tired. And if anybody could have seen me in my vineyard getup -- I was walking around in a terrycloth tube top and these funny '70s shorts, covered with mud, wearing a bandana and braces. In the book, vineyard managers like Allen Holstein (formerly of Knudsen-Erath, today at Argyle) recall yields of six tons of pinot noir to the acre back in those days. What kind of wine did these high-yield harvests make? My dad said in our vineyard, six tons an acre produced low-quality, pale and acidic wine. Bad in general, with rare exceptions. We harvest and plant much more efficiently now, with low-yield/high-density ratio. What effect did the Mount St. Helens eruption have on the vineyards in 1980? (Vineyard owners) Sally Bauers' and Julia Wayne's memories of the ash in the vineyard are still clear: Seeing gray ash covering the vineyard is a surreal picture, like something out of a movie. Technically, according to my father, the leaves suffered from lack of photosynthesis, (as they were covered in ash), and the fruit was hard to process, but the end result didn't seem to be affected. What are your recollections of harvest 1984, when 17 inches of rain fell in one month? Poor fruit or nothing at all. A disaster. Mud slides in the vineyard, torrents of rain. Sally Bauers sliding in her Chevy Silverado down the side of the vineyard and almost over an embankment. She remembers cutting holes out of plastic bags and sticking them over the heads of workers for coats. Everyone had horror stories. There was hardly any decent wine from this harvest. What were early harvest parties like? This one at Erath sticks out in my mind. People came down from Seattle in their Jaguars and were expecting this French chateau experience. They thought they would be drinking wine and there would be people waiting on them. Instead they got there and were expected to pick. That did not work out very well. . . . There wasn't a lot of glamour in those days, but there was a lot of fun. Usually we were covered from head to toe in grape skins, grape juice and mud, not to mention dog fur. Most people were pretty bleary-eyed, as we'd been up since 4:30 in the morning. Invariably you'd stop and eat something and have a glass of wine when you did your last load. That would end up being a six-hour harvest party because we were so happy to be done. The book paints a picture of a group of people showing up in the Dundee Hills in the 1970s and withstanding hardships -- limited plumbing, electricity and phone service, red mud everywhere -- to plant grapes. What kept you all going? Despite the overwhelming obstacles, it was an exciting adventure. People felt a sense of community and a sense that we all shared the same hobby. Many people went to work during the day and wore suits and came home and put on vineyard clothes and went out and worked in the vineyard. The one thing we had in common was everybody really believing that making wine in Oregon could be done. . . . We had no idea, or at least little idea, that people and businesses would show up as a result of planting our vineyards, certainly not to this extent. This was simply a lifestyle, albeit a unique one, that we all happened to choose in the early '70s in the Red Hills. That it would take hold of the imaginations of people as it has -- almost like a gold rush -- still amazes me. Katherine Cole: 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201Katherine Cole writes on the wine industry twice a month for Sunday Living in Style and twice a month for FOODday on wine and food pairings.Copyright (c) 2004 Oregonian Publishing Co. Record Number: 0409100170 |
