Philosophy
“A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world” - Louis Pasteur
Farming is a journey of humility, learning, wonder, and sometimes some good, old-fashioned butt-whipping. It takes a lot of intellectual, physical, and emotional agility. Many people have been taught to believe that farmers are simple people, and farming is a simple-person’s profession. But that is just madness. It is a difficult path, as evidenced by the diaspora to cities after the Industrial Revolution. As I understand it, many children of farmers ran to the nearest train tracks, jumped boxcars and flocked to cities just to avoid gopher-trapping duty.
In 2018, Peter and I established Bracken Vineyard and harvested the first crop from the original vines planted in 2016. The butt-whipping began almost immediately. The vole attacks on vines we experienced in July 2020 followed by smoke in the skies of Oregon in September 2020 followed by an incredible ice storm in February 2021 confirmed that bad things come in threes - and that we didn’t have to wait long for the butt-whipping part.
Frankly, the vineyard was so chopped up by the time we pulled the vole-chewed, dying vines that it gave me the opportunity to look at the vineyard differently - to make it our own and rethink how it was originally established. Blocks had been laid out by clone, matched with specific rootstocks that I would have never chosen in most instances. When grape buyers came to visit they would order clones from each section as if ordering a sandwich from a deli. They were missing the point. Bracken isn’t about clones - or even variety - it’s the site. Thus our massive replant in 2021 created clonal blends throughout the vineyard. Different sources of genetic material now commingles within Bracken. Also, rootstocks better suited to dry farming were chosen, making the vineyard more resilient for the long-term. I’ve often quoted Cormac McCarthy: “Who’s to know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from.” I guess we’ll find out.
It is our intention not only to make wine from this place we call home but to provide grapes to other, like-minded craft wine producers. We currently we are working with Twill, Violin, Walter Scott, and David Paige Wines. I love our group of winemakers. It’s not just a transaction - farming is way too difficult to just sell grapes. Rather, the conversations we have and excitement for each vintage and this site bring so much more to the table. Their dedication to the craft is epic and I am honored to work with these fine humans.
From my perspective, it is all about the vineyard and my job as winemaker is to get out of the way, But, one should only get out of the way if the fruit coming into the winery has been farmed for balance and quality. The decisions to be made in a farming endeavor are seemingly endless and wine grape farming is even more nuanced because the vintage is a singular expression. We operate with a few tenets in mind:
Natural acidity is the Queen - she runs the show and should be respected.
We farm organically, without synthetics or herbicide applications.
We work to keep plastics out of our soils and therefore out of our wines.
We utilize biodynamic sprays (500, 501...) and several different plant teas as a supplement to our spray program. Plant medicine is useful and important.
We till to control young vine competition - and to control rodents after losing 1/3 of our plantings to voles in 2020. While no-till would be wonderful to keep additional CO2 in the ground we believe that it is very difficult to discuss vineyard philosophy without grapevines.
We try to correct nitrogen and other components in the vineyard so that our yeasts have the nutrition they need for natural fermentation before they arrive at the winery.
We are also researching the historical geology of our part of the Eola Hills which we call “The Eola Bench.” It is our hope that a greater understanding of our structural geology will help us make farming corrections in the future. Making this contribution of understanding of the place we call home.
There is so much to observe, so much to learn and vineyard work is a constant walking meditation. Is there any greater wealth than the autonomy of thought in a sandbox full of wonder?
ON FARMING
I handle all the winemaking as a one-person operation housed within Coelho Winery in Amity and have been making my wines there since 2016. Peter jumps in for harvest and bottling support and an occasional project of his own (see, e.g. Weather Balloon). All sparkling bottling and disgorgement/capping/cork work done by hand and small lots below 100 cases are bottled by hand.
I initially learned to make what would be considered a natural wine. It took a couple of years to encounter additives. I learned to use them while working for other wineries and quickly came to realize that they are a game of fear: the kinds of things people buy to hedge risk or buy if they become captivated by fear - but probably don’t really need unless a nasty problem emerges. Perkins Harter wines experience natural fermentations except the tirage innoculation for our sparkling wines.
I am very sensitive to sulfur so my wines are made with low to no sulfur depending on wine type and vintage microbial pressure. If there is a perceived risk of fungal activity leading up to bottling (in a must or elévage) that could potentially get beyond my acceptable threshold of microbial activity, I will use sulfur to control populations. If sulfur is used, it is typically added at bottling ~25ppm depending on total acidity and pH. I lean towards light reduction with exceptions. I generally lean towards neutral oak with some exceptions. I often “rock salt” new barrels to reduce their imprint. Extreme reduction can inhibit site character so, and I am looking to produce wines that can show off our site, not winemaking techniques.
My ultimate focus is to provide transparency into my site in the context of its location in the Eola-Amity Hills as a farmer. If we’ve done our job in the vineyard and executed a good picking decision then there is much less that needs to be done in the winery. Therefore, low intervention with an eye towards cleanliness and timely action is a primary goal in the cellar. I eschew winemaking techniques that could make a more user-friendly wine, but would thereby limit an understanding of the uniqueness of our site.
On wineMAKING
In 2006 I walked away from my government desk where I had perfect marks, working on incredibly interesting things and had a permanent job…forever. As an extreme specialist in the nuclear waste field there was virtually no where else I could go use my expertise. “What are you going to do?” they asked again and again - pleading me to stay, tossing fishing nets of fear above me. “I don’t know, something more creative….” Yet it was the fear of certainty and complete safety that felt like death to me - and restlessness and impermanence felt more like life and pulled me out the door.
I had no good business getting into winemaking. I stumbled my way into an internship in Healdsburg, California in 2009 having close to zero idea what I was doing. I did some WSET and somm training in DC - but I really just bought a car and rented a house and showed up. Once there I found something more comfortable, more friendly, and definitely more joyful than I could have expected. This first experience showed me a greater understanding about the intended use of wine, the culture of it.
Wine is perhaps a futile attempt to capture time and place. It is the child’s netting of butterflies or the mason jar of fireflies that inevitably expire regardless of how many holes are punched in the lid. Getting out of my jar made the rest of my life gravy but has given me the opportunity to observe, explore, and ponder the beauty of impermanence. But any good existentialist worth their weight in id knows that a table and a glass of wine can be an entire universe. With knowledge and well-direction intentions, wines can live longer than any of us. A narcissists’ dream. Tables are a place of sharing, a last bastion of civilization. A peaceable kingdom.
THE WHY OF WINE
It is a horrifically difficult time to be a small farmer in America - or anywhere for that matter. In a former life I was a Science Policy Fellow at the National Academies, examining climate geoengineering - because that’s what people do, right? Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist, was the head of the National Academy of Sciences at the time. I was dead-set on talking him up about my revolutionary ideas about how we could corral ethicists and scientists to have meaningful ethical discussions to avoid high-magnitude and high-probability risk. He just looked at me and said: “Yeah, well…we’re going to geoengineer this planet to overcome human-induced climate change, we’re going to do it in our lifetimes, and we’re going to do it under the veil of secrecy.” Then he walked away and I realized I was absolutely wasting my time.
People ask me what I think about climate change all the time. I’ve seen science suppressed, I’ve worked on environmental models, and even tried to support the search for “black swans” before they come over the event horizon for futurists. Most climate models are probably wrong because we don’t know what we’re doing. We are children - and we are just searching in the dark. More specifically, we are in a vast, dark universe of the unknown and we are careening through space and time at 72 kilometers per megaparsec while circling the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. That’s insane - so the fact that any of us are alive is just plain gravy, a total win.
So - back to the brilliant idea of being a farmer in an era of climate change.
Having studied and worked in the realm of geology, I am fully aware that this planet we inhabit has already seen some serious shit. It is moving internally like a bad case of food poisoning, plates sliding around on a bellyache of liquid metal cores and releasing incredible amounts of heat and force as it cools. Massive mountains, deep chasms, rivers, lakes, fault lines, caves, meteor impacts: they have all appeared under extreme force. In airplanes I find myself glued to the window for hours - soaking in the radiation and wondering what processes led to those forms below…and how many people are down there. I am amazed by the vast amount of terraforming we have done to create reams of crop circle fabric across plains, webs of roads, anthills of nightlights, vast pillows of steam from energy plants, boxes of shopping centers and serpents of suburban sprawl galore. I try to envision what it would look like if we had never been there at all…and what it could look like in another 100 years. I wonder why no one else is looking out the window because these views yield real truths. Real news.
There is another way to look at the unpredictable Anthropocene. The Earth is fundamentally a battery - it is a cathode full of stored organic chemical energy - and space is the anode of equilibrium. Without our stored biomass our world would be an inhospitable world. Unfortunately, our supply of biomass on this planet is dwindling. The race to the bottom led by invisible hands has had real and lasting effects on this planet. The human inclination to organize by tribes and resource grab is woven into our basic genetics. Our ultimate default is the eventual implosion of population when our civilization taxes the Earth’s resources too far. This is the intelligence of the genetics of us - consistent with the Gaia Principle. The Earth will go on with or without us - and it’s up for us to decide whether we want to get down to brass tacks and survive or kill ourselves off. Gaia doesn’t care either way what we do and but whenever we all go down it will be one hell of a fossil record.
Biomass is one thing we need to build and preserve to survive. So here we are at Bracken…trying to steward some land and build biomass on a hillside, hoping some brilliant Los Alamos geoengineering idea doesn’t send us careening into an ice age anytime soon. Unknown unknowns are a thing.
I realize I supposed to be talking about terroir and wine - but I dragged you through the 30k view to get you to a major personal tenet of the why one might grow wine. The ultimate why is a defiance of the human inclination to resource grab - replacing it instead with an expression of optimism, hope and sharing.
ON CLIMATE AND UNCERTAINTY
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”
- Søren Kierkgaard