Winery-ing

On what appeared to be the first beautiful day in October, Aaron and I took the opportunity to visit some of the local wineries.  Minnesota wineries are growing rapidly and the number tipped 30 this year.  Being that we had only been to a handful of these, we wanted to keep up!  So we took advatage of a colorful, no snow, free October Saturday to take a day trip and go, what I like to call, winery-ing. 

We visited 3 of them southeast of us.  From our home in Waconia, we traveled to Jordan to visit Crofut Winery to New Market for lunch (and ate at the best little Ma and Pop Country Cafe) to Cannon Falls to visit Cannon River Winery and then to Red Wing to visit Falconer Winery.  Roundtrip it was about 170 miles.  But driving on back roads through charming little towns with cute window shops and being able to admire the fall foliage this late into October made the drive extremely pleasant and leisurely. 


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We had a few takeaways from our trip:

1.  There are lots of Minnesotans that also like to go winery-ing!  Along with the growing numbers of wineries is also a growing number of wine drinkers in this state!  And it appeared to us that demand may be outweighing the supply.  Great news for us!  This was particularly evident at Cannon River Winery which is actually located 10 miles away from the actual vineyard.  Their tasting room is in an old building in the downtown of Cannon Falls, where they had live music playing and lots of people chattering away while sipping wine.  We walked in at about 1:30pm on a Saturday afternoon and the place looked like a bar in downtown Minneapolis at 10pm, except with a slightly more mature crowd.  They offered several tastings and for the first time ever at a wine tasting room, we were actually very politely asked to step away from the bar between our tastings so that others could step up to get their next tasting on the wine flight.   I've never seen a tasting room quite so lively, even in our trip out to Napa!  And when we got to Falconer we even saw familiar faces of people we had seen at the previous tasting room.  A very telling sign that Minnesota wine has found a place on the map.

2.  We gained some insightful thoughts and ideas on grape growing.  An advantage for us when we go wine tasting is that when we mention to the wine pourer that we are fellow grape growers, we usually get a special introduction to the owner, vineyard manager or wine maker.  People in the industry always like to meet, talk, and exchange ideas, especially with other Minnesota growers.  And talking to people who are actually successful doing this is a great opportunity for us to ask questions.  So we got some expert advice (drawn on cocktail napkins) from Mr. Falconer himself on what type of trellis system to use, and ideas on what Minnesota grapes are "hot" for wine making now from Mr. Crofut and Mrs. Cannon River.  :)

3.  We got our wheels spinning with ideas for our OWN winery or tasting room someday and an overall sense that we can absolutely make this happen.  Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like getting out there and seeing what you like, what you don't like, and dreaming up brand new ideas.   As is generally the case, funds and the government tends to be the obstacle for making things happen the way you want.  In our case, it is the most local of governments that is preventing us from getting a winery license, which naturally is the key to having a winery.  Because we live on a gravel road, a new business bringing in traffic means the township has to spend additional money to maintain the gravel road with chemicals and truck graters more frequently.  We found this out a year ago, when our friends down the road, applied for a winery license.  Mr. Deardorff who has owned an apple orchard for nearly 30 years, also lives in a gravel road, but through some negotiation and the fact that he was very simply just expanding an already existing business, he was granted a license.  However, as Aaron and I were sitting in at the meeting, it was clearly noted, that the board would not be likely to grant a license to "a young couple new to the area that is just getting started with a vineyard."  Okay, they didn't say it quite like that, but it was pretty close!  But that doesn't stop us.  We believe it will be a matter of time, city progression, development, and most importantly, persistence and determination, and it will happen.  And if not, we are already thinking creatively on other ways to bring our wine to the market. 

As a side note to this, Parley Lake Winery, which is the expanded apple orchard and also in Laketown Township, opened their doors on Labor Day weekend and have already sold out of most of their wine!  Another couple a few miles north of us in Waconia planted a vineyard, although I'm unsure of their plans for winery.  As I mentioned earlier, Aaron and I traveled almost 170 miles roundtrip to see three wineries.  How absolutely cool would it be to have our own little wine country just in Waconia and be able to potentially visit three wineries in about a seven mile radius?!

It was a productive weekend of winery-ing and we walked away feeling even more inspired.

My Next 30 Years

Today, I am 30. Sigh. I am newly married, and although not yet a mother, already live in a place where I can envision my grandchildren come visit me. It's a strange thought, but also comforting to think I could double my lifetime in this very spot and still have just as much adventure, discovery, and development as my first thirty years, especially considering I moved at least 8 times just in my 20s.  My first 30 years have been wonderfully eventful, full of firsts, and every moment and decision ultimately brought me to the happy and interesting place I am today, which I could never have predicted or planned even if I tried.  So today, instead of sitting home and plucking my gray hairs, agonizing over fine lines, lamenting on my adolescent years and carefree 20s now behind me (because I would never do that), I can't help but think about what lies ahead in my next 30 years.  Which brings to mind the song by Tim McGraw, "My Next 30 Years."

I think I’ll take a moment, celebrate my age
The ending of an era and the turning of a page
Now it’s time to focus in on where I go from here
Lord have mercy on my next thirty years

Hey my next thirty years I’m gonna have some fun
Try to forget about all the crazy things I’ve done
Maybe now I’ve conquered all my adolescent fears
And I’ll do it better in my next thirty years

My next thirty years I’m gonna settle all the scores
Cry a little less, laugh a little more
Find a world of happiness without the hate and fear
Figure out just what I’m doing here
In my next thirty years

Oh my next thirty years, I’m gonna watch my weight
Eat a few more salads and not stay up so late
Drink a little lemonade and not so many beers
Maybe I’ll remember my next thirty years

My next thirty years will be the best years of my life
Raise a little family and hang out with my wife
Spend precious moments with the ones that I hold dear
Make up for lost time here , In my next thirty years



Except....I will "hang out with my" husband. Not my wife.  And let's be honest, I'll probably drink more wine and less lemonade.  We're not growing any lemons here!  Other than those few lines, this song rings true. 
 
Bring on the next 30.  I think it will be just as gripping a tale.

Vintage Furniture Shopping

Some may call it "antiquing", but that term always make me think of shopping for trinkety little things.  I think "vintage furniture shopping" more accurately describes my new obsession. 

When we officially moved into our house, Aaron and I each still owned a house and a condo respectively that both needed to remain furnished to be staged on the market and rented out furnished, so our pieces of furniture totaled zero for our new home.   Not to mention that the staple bachelor pad black leather sectional wouldn't really fit the character of our 1950 original farmhouse anyway.  Nor would my Target "assembly required" entertainment center. 

The day after we closed, we hopped on Craigslist in a desperate attempt to find something to sit on and eat on, a simple requirement.  One thing led to another and we found ourselves at a vintage furniture shop sale across town.  The first thing we saw when we walked in was this table. 

It was love at first sight.  This table completes our kitchen.  The shop owner told us it was a solid 80 year old Hungarian Virgin Pine table.  And no, I still don't know what "virgin" means in terms of wood, but it sounded good!  We don't know who owned it prior to it going to this shop, but just imaging some Hungarian family sitting around it eating apple strudel circa 1930 personified the table for us.  We walked away that day with a few treasures including this table, a distressed dresser, and a painted buffet.  It was the beginning of my love of historical furniture pieces and I have since added several more to our home as we've continued decorating and furnishing our home.

Aaron's always told me to keep my eyes open for anything fitting for the winery.  So imagine his surprise yesterday when I told him I was only running to Target, but then he got a picture text from me a half hour later of this:

Okay, so I wasn't just running to Target. 

Maybe I ran into my local antique shop and stumbled upon this.  It may not be "virgin", but it's a nice solid pine at a perfect height for a wine tasting.  A fine complement to our kitchen table, and adds some and substance to our chicken coop, aka. our future tasting room.   All I could find out about it was that it was from an old hotel barn in southern Minnesota.  It may be a while before we can convince the township board to grant us our winery license, but in the meantime, we'll be working on our tasting room.  Here's a start.

PickPocketing Pups

One thing Aaron and I definitely talked about before adopting our dogs was the financial responsibility we would be taking on over the course of their lifetimes, especially considering we have a few other obligations in the coming years...ahem...starting with the truckload of 500 8- ft wooden posts that we just bought that were dumped in our yard that we'll be using to build trellises this month in the vineyard.  That is, if the ground isn't FROZEN!  Can you believe we are getting SNOW in Minnesota already??

I figured the costs of owning dogs were pretty explicit- buy them food, pay for their vet bills, get all the necessary dog accessories.  I hadn't thought about the other unexpected costs, like replacing chewed up phone chargers or actually considering buying a bigger SUV just so they can fit in the car together if we go on any roadtrips.  You know...those "replacement" costs never crossed my mind before.  Nevermind the fact that they eat 6 cups of food a day and I'm on a first name basis with the cashier at PetSmart. 

But I have to admit I found humor in the fact that their tendency to be money eating creatures became quite literal the other day.  In a brief moment when we were negligent parents and not paying attention to our puppys' whereabouts, they managed to find Aaron's pants in our bedroom and chew a hole in the back pocket.  When we found them, they were cheerfully gnawing on his wallet, with singles and twenties scattered all around them that they had apparently pawed out of the wallet.  Jackpot!  We're not sure if they were after the cash and were planning a rendezvous in a dark field with the German Shepherd dog biscuit dealer to buy some good stuff, trying to get at the plastic so they could trot down to Target and run up the card on a shopping spree, or simply just liked the taste of the leather wallet.  We're hoping the latter.  In all the things we considered with expenses, never did we think they may actually just try to steal from us...or literally eat our money.

See them here getting a nice little belly rub and how sly they are getting in a sniff of Aaron's back pocket?  Little did we know what they would be up to just days later. 

Yet another thing we need to do if we are hope to open our doors to the public someday:  Teach our dogs that pickpocketing is naughty!

The Transformation: Vineyard and Garden

When Aaron and I were searching for properties before buying our place in Waconia, we had very different search criteria. Our styles were a nice complement to each other because if we had gone based solely on his criteria, we might have ended up living in a tent on a gorgeous piece of land, and if we had gone solely on my criteria, we might have ended up living in a gorgeous home on a piece of land with poor soil for growing grapes.  The balance was nice. As we went and looked at properties, Aaron would walk the land, survey the property and do soil samples, while I would cruise the house for interior quality and decorating potential. We were able to identify some key characteristics that were important to both of us:   A minimum of 10 acres, good elevation, hardy soil, southern facing land, on the west side of the twin cities (by my request since I grew up on this side), and a house with good bones...aka, comfortable liveable. Taking on a complete fixer upper at the same time we were going to start growing a vineyard could have been trouble. And the big kicker-this all had to fit in our price range.

When we came to our place in Waconia...we knew we were home:
A cute little house sat at the top of 12.42 acres of southern facing sloped land overlooking a little lake. Hills on the other side were filled with trees giving it a beautiful skyline. And to top it off, the soil was great. We had heard it was a former horse pasture and the manure supplied great nutrients imbedded in the soil. Mmmmm...

The Vineyard

The raw land.  This was before we started anything!

Okay, fine one more shirtless picture!  Sorry, honey! I can't help it...this is just how he looks when he is hard at work!  Here is Aaron with our first little ghetto lawn tractor we bought off of Craigslist.  We decided it didn't quite cut it and have since upgraded. 

This was our first spring...little vines in growing tubes in June 2008.

We planted 220 vines on a small plot and let a local farmer plant corn on the rest of the property. We traded him the use of our land for the use of his BIG tractor for tilling up the land to get ready for planting grapevines.

Grapevines and the corn field

September 2008

2009

And this year we expanded....

Thanks to the help of our committed planting friends and family

who came out on the coldest day in May to help us plant...

This is our vineyard THIS year...2009

The Garden

This is our ridiculously overgrown garden the first summer we moved in 2008.  All those green bushes are weeds!

This is Aaron putting a torch to that animal of garden. Seriously. We really burned it down.

Did you think I was kidding??? 

Here we are enjoying our garden bonfire at LAST fall's harvest party...

And here is the garden started from scratch in April 2009.  We cut down most of the trees to open up the view to the vineyard and covered the garden with black tarp to control the weeds.  Worked like a charm!

Believe it or not, those are all tomato plants in the front corner of this picture.  But no more weeds!

I'll keep this post to just the outdoor transformation.  Up next, before and afters of our slow transformation as we get the old farm house repainted, refreshed, and rearranged!

Party in the Chicken Coop

Back in college and in my sorority days, we used to have a photographer called "Joe Photo" show up at all of our events and take pictures.  Afterwards, we could order pictures from him, labeled with the event and the date.  It was great because we never had to worry about carrying our own cameras around all night, which was a blessing because before the digital era, any time a group of girls wanted to take a picture when Joe Photo wasn't around, we had to take one with each. girl's. camera.   So we ended up with like 10 cameras all with the same photo.  Remember those days? Anyway, I've decided next time I host a party maybe it'd be a good idea to call up Joe Photo and have him take pictures for me.  I LOVE having pictures, but when I am playing host at my own party, which I did last night, I hate to disrupt a good conversation with my guests to take pictures.  So even though my camera was dangling from my wrist all night with the intention of capturing some good photo opportunities, I only got a few from our 2nd Annual Harvest Party.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case, I need a thousand words to describe a picture.  Or event.

No, I didn't get a picture of all of our guests who stopped out for the night.  Or of the big bonfire out in the field and our pathway of tiki torches that led down to it.  And no, I didn't get a picture of the women, who showed up in cute mary jane shoes and black leather boots who walked out to the bonfire and got their heels stuck in the mud. Or, a photo of the group around the bonfire once it died down to just a flat surface of hot coals, with all the men holding shovels to poke in the fire, looking like a bunch of Paul Bunyan's.  And when we decided to let the dogs out from the basement to have them mingle with our guests for a bit, I didn't get a shot of our sweet neighbor after the dogs tried to lick her face and left four mud prints all over the front of her sweatshirt.  And I didn't get a photo of my two year old nephew who in the most adorable way, thought he was being helpful and safe and kept blowing out all the candles, including the one under the serving dish that was keeping the apple crisp warm.  Those are just a few of the things that I did not get pictures of at this year's Harvest Party.

I regretfully never got a "before" picture of the inside of the chicken coop, which may be a good thing, because I don't know how well a building all walled up into little rooms, filled with corn feed, insulation and chicken poop would photograph.  And because I didn't get a "before" picture, it makes any "after" picture much less impressive.  Last year, once we decided we would not be raising chickens here at Schram Vineyards, Aaron opened it up by knocking down all the walls, except one with the old half barn door that we wanted to keep for originality.  Then I shoveled out all the chicken droppings, and powerwashed the whole interior. If Aaron wasn't already completely head over heels in love with me before then, the day he watched me powerwash the chicken coop and was covered head to toe in chicken poop, was the day he started looking at me with little hearts in his eyes.  That day he saw for certain his uptown girl could really rough it. 

It still has a lot of re-structuring and a long way to go before it will be an acceptable tasting room, but for the time being, with white lights wrapped around the rafters, the aromas of chili, hot cider and mulled wine wafting the air, and a propane heater in the corner, it makes a pretty mean party central.

I snapped a few photos, but the only decent one was, coincidentally, of me with two of my sorority sisters who were able to make it out, one who even traveled from Illinois to be here!  Here we are 10 years later in much less formal attire than above.  Even without Joe Photo, we did get one picture from "Harvest Party, October 3rd, 2009."

"WASH ME"

I bought my pretty evergreen Jeep Liberty three years ago, almost to the date. At that time, I imagined myself cruising around uptown with the windows down and tunes up, and looking cute and trendy in my shiny new truck.  And I did for a while. But the same week I bought it was also the very same week I met Aaron. What I didn't know at the time I bought this Jeep, was that 17 months later I would be getting engaged and buying a house in the country on a gravel.  A gravel road I found charming at first, but have grown to find rather annoying.  Not only has it given my Jeep a permanent layered of dust, but it is also the one thing standing in the way of us getting a winery license right now, as we may be facing a battle with the township board over this very gravel road. (Another topic altogether...just planting some material for another post, another day). 

Here's what I didn't imagine when I purchased my Jeep:

I never imagined I would drive up to the gas station and the guy at the pump next to me would eye the mud caked all over my Jeep and ask, "Wow, you been off roadin' in that thing?" And I would respond, "Nope. I've just been driving to and from home...live on a gravel road...hehe"  

I never thought that mine would be the car that would get "WASH ME" written in the dirt on the back of it and that the words would disappear only because more dust filled the letters in and not because the car was actually washed. 

OR,

That my husband would have "Just Married" etched in the dirt on the back of his car at our wedding in June, and that strangers in parking lots would still be congratulating him in August. 

No, I never imagined when I bought this Jeep that the episodes that would occur with it could be good potential material for Jeff Foxworthy in his "you just might be a red neck" jokes. Nope. Never imagined that.

For the record, I DO get car washes...occassionally.  They just become pointless after awhile because a clean car really only lasts a couple of days, at best. 

Nope. Never imagined all of this when I bought my pretty green Jeep.  It builds character, right?  At least that's what I keep telling myself.