Harvest 2023: Tempranillo

Candice and Steve holding one of the first clusters we picked.

We did it. Our first harvest. Tempranillo from Freed Estate Vineyard, Umpqua Valley, Oregon.

We got the word that the brix was where it should be and the birds were being relentless, so we drove down on Wednesday, 9/20.

We had a hiccup in our plans the day we left. Although we signed a contract with AVP, got insured, and had been assured that we were good to go, there was some chitchat behind the scenes that we were not privy to, and the powers that be decided we should make wine under Cristina, who contracts with AVP. Originally, we planned to contract with Cristina separately to help us if we needed help. We didn’t really understand what the issue was, but we were assured that everything would remain the same, so we agreed to it. In any event, we didn’t have time to think about any of this. We had literally driven to AVP to pick up our field bins and were on our way to go harvest our grapes. We had no other place to make our wine, so we felt we had no choice but to agree to the changes and keep the peace. We were very concerned about pissing everyone off right from the beginning in this very niche community of small winemakers in the Portland area, so we went with the flow and decided to believe that everyone here had good intent.

We drove down to Winston feeling a little uneasy, but still excited about this adventure we were embarking upon. We spent the night at Candice’s mom’s house and woke up early in the morning to pick. It took way longer than we anticipated, as we couldn’t just simply pick clusters and throw them in buckets, but we had to examine each cluster to see if it had rot or raisining. So we ended up staying overnight again and leaving to go back to Portland on Friday morning.

We got back to AVP around noon on Friday and helped to process the grapes—putting them through the destemmer and crusher and into their fermentors.

Everything about the AVP arrangement began to get weirder. We understood when we first signed up that we would be able to make our own wine and direct the process of making it, and that the winemaker we contracted with would be there to answer questions we had and show us how to use AVP’s equipment and whatnot. But it became clear in text messages between us that our questions were annoying to the winemaker and that she wanted to direct the process as if we hired her to make the wine for us. Our whole thing was that we wanted to make our own wine! It’s literally what we came here to do. It was increasingly difficult to be able to ask questions without getting annoyed responses back. We tried to remember that harvest is a stressful time, and that people may not be at their best right now. Plus, there may be things lost in translation over text.

We were told when we got back to AVP that we wouldn’t even be allowed on the property if Cristina wasn’t there. This was really hard to swallow, and Candice expressed that it felt like we got tricked into a situation we never wanted. The winemaker basically said we could accept it or we could move our wine somewhere else. We didn’t have anywhere we could move it, so we had no choice to accept it at that point. We could sue for breach of contract, but to what end? Being blacklisted in the Portland wine community? We decided to chalk this up to a lesson learned and hopefully we’d be in our own place the next year.

But what started out as something sweet and magical was slowly starting to feel sour. It affected our entire experience and was hard on our relationship. We felt really trapped in something we never intended to sign up for.

Here are some photos of some of the winemaking we got to do over the days and weeks following harvest: