I Fucking Love My Work

I’m headed back home to the winery after most of the week in Portland to take care of some family issues. God, how I have missed my morning routine in the cellar, and god how I fucking love my work!

There is nothing routine about getting to the winery every morning at 6:30 am and taking readings of the fermentation bins and pumping over and inoculating newly arrived fermenters though the procedure is the same each time. Each day is one point on a timeline of progress, on a pathway to apotheosis…it is the same as saying that every day I feed my toddler and bathe him is routine, only if you totally discount the growth of that young being, the change he experiences every single day.

This is life in the cellar during harvest. Change is the expected and the constant. Evolution is what we guide as winemakers, and any interruption to this process is cause for my own selfish resentment. I have an amazing team to make sure that things proceed the way they are supposed to; I am blessed to have Beth Refsnider and my son, Aidan, watching over things and making the right decisions in my absence. But each day I am not around my wines is a day I can never get back.

As one who fervently believes in doing what he does passionately and completely this situation is a bitter pill. Life is complicated, circumstances beyond one’s control are ever-present, and one must make amends sometimes for falling off track. Such is one of those times. The 2021 vintage is shaping up to be magnificent, and the wines we will make from this season will be memorable, evocative, and will add richness and joy to peoples’ lives. It will also be incomplete and fractured. But – I am confident – only for me.