Valentine’s Day Post, Of Course

I got to thinking the other day.

My wife and I love each other.  We truly do.  I was feeling sentimental one day as I was on my way home from work.   While in that frame of mind, I stopped to pick up some groceries for dinner and bought a lottery ticket.  Now, after each purchase of a lottery ticket, my imagination drifts off to the Land of Whatif.   It would be cool to take our winnings, buy that old peach orchard, and grow some grapes.   We could name our wine after our daughter.  We could have charcoal sketches of our Havanese adorning the labels.  People would travel miles to taste our cellared selections.  They would ask to take photos of us holding our fine stemware posing with our dogs in front of barrels of our next vintage.

My passport to the Land of Whatif got revoked when my subconscious asked, “Can you two really operate a winery together?  After five years of marriage, she can’t seem to replace an empty roll of toilet paper and you can’t hand wash dishes to save your life?” Good point.

Can our lottery prize dreamland be that far off?  We’re both intelligent people.  We love wine.  I’ve grown peppers and tomatoes.  She’s pursuing her MBA.   I can blend together a nice beet rissotto.   She’s in sales.  On paper, it looks like we could.  But darn, we can drive each other crazy sometimes.  Like all married couples.  How do other other couples do it?

“I was attracted to the romantic side of it,”  said Heather Brown of Wagonhouse Winery, recalling how her husband Dan and she first chose to enter the winemaking business.

Dan & Heather Brown

To them, owning and operating a winery did not seem too much of a stretch. After all, Dan comes from a family of local farmers.  Certainly going from making wine in the basement to a full scale operation couldn’t be too difficult.

Well, while growing up on a farm helped, actually owning your own farm takes on its own inertia.  ”Like a snowball” is how Dan describes it.   Once they started with leasing family property for the vineyard, the winery took off.  Almost on its own.  Without them.   Even with his agriculture background and her business experience, managing a vineyard and filling cases of wine still sprang a few surprises on them – monetary, meteorlogical, and mechanical.   But, as Heather said, at each step, with each challenge, they realized that they couldn’t go back, they had to go forward.

“You have to have a great skill set,”  Dan said, highlighting the key to staying on top of the business.  Meaning, you may know how to mix a great blend of wine, but you really ought to know how to use duct tape and bailing wire to keep your tractor running.

Of course, there are always the financial anxieties every family business experiences. Staking your savings in agricultural venture and then having The Weather Channel post the odds of your success doesn’t seem that glamorous.  In fact, the Browns still have other full-time jobs –  he with the USDA and she raising three young boys.   Each of them squeezing hours of tending vines, bottling, and marketing around those jobs.  Yet after six years of operation, they can see a point in time when winemaking is all they do. Until then, they think a farm is a great environment for their boys to grow up in.

Todd and Kenna Wuerker are what the Browns may be in the near future.

Todd too has farming in his blood.  He comes from a family of dairymen and vegetable growers.  He knows how to keep a tractor running and just the right amount of Merlot to blend with Syrah.   After having other jobs, the Wuerkers are now 100% in the wine business after opening their tasting room in 2009.   (The Browns expect to open their new tasting room this April.)

Todd & Kenna Wuerker

When I asked Todd how it is working with his spouse, he quickly relates how the success of Hawk Haven Vineyards & Winery is completely due to their combined efforts.  ”She has a different skill set,”  he says, which makes them “very compatible.”

Kenna points out that he’s laid back and she’s regimented.  With her background in sales, she was used to “things being cleaned up by the time they got to her.”  She wants every aspect of the business to proceed in an orderly fashion.  He knows Mother Nature scoffs at such expectations.  Yet, Hawk Haven doubled its sales from 2009 to 2010 and they are looking to expand their acreage because Todd and Kenna are able to “meet in the middle” with their combined talents and move the business forward.  (That makes me hopeful in resolving the toilet paper roll issue.)

When talking to the Browns and the Wuerkers, you do pick up that each couple make excellent teammates.  Hey, my wife and I make a heck of a team in Pictionary, so we have that going for us.  But outside of a few vegetable plants and a row of zinnias by the front stoop, we’re not decendant from generations of farmers.

Than again, neither were Scott and Jules Donnini.  As a matter of fact, they probably had less preparation to become winemakers than my wife and me.  They’re lawyers by trade.

Scott, Jules, and their partners Dave, Shannon, Jen, and Joe all followed the lottery winner’s dream.  They wanted to chuck their day jobs to pursue their passion.  Trouble was, none of them had won the lottery.

As far as wine experience goes, Shannon had the most.  She had been a bartender.  Okay, before they actually opened  Auburn Road Vineyard & Winery, they did grow a couple of acres of vines to see if they could.

Looking back, Scott chuckles and then volunteers, “What we didn’t know, helped.”  Think about it, the elegance of wine in the bottle belies its gritty origins.  Owning a winery is more than farming, which is hard work in its own right.  A normal farmer grows his crop and then sells it.  He grows the blueberries, someone else makes the blueberry pie.  A winemaker plants the crop, tends the crops, picks the crop, stores the crop, processes the crop, packages the changed crop, and then markets the changed crop.   Fundamentally speaking, winery owners are responsible from seed to shelf.

As Scott admits, to even think about opening a winery, “You have to be a little nuts.” If the owners of Auburn Road understood exactly what they were getting into, they would have never opened their doors.  Yet, as it turns out, while the group had no formal enological training before launching their venture, they discovered they had a knack for it.

Jules describes their business as “all consuming” and for a husband and wife to live this lifestyle, “they have to come to it together.”  As it turns out, the winery business may be a better fit for their lifestyle than the legal profession.   Sure they work long hours just like before, but now they work them together on a joint passion.  And even though they experienced the usual ups and downs any business partners have, the Donnini’s believe they are closer with each other than before.

The Auburn Road crew gives me hope that the Land of Whatif is closer than I realize.  All the winemakers followed their bliss, as Joseph Campbell would have said, into the business. So what if you have little or no experience?  Even learned farmhands such as Dan Brown and Todd Wuerker both said that, despite all of their prior experience and preparation, they really only learned the wine business by doing it.

What I learned from these couples is that passion is all it takes to get you started, but it takes a solid partnership to keep it going.