Our Grapes from the Hess Creek Vineyard. Beautiful soil formerly occupied by twenty acres of solid blackberry.

We've never really liked the phrase "Passion for Pinot".

You hear it quite a bit in the Willamette valley. It's not that people aren't passionate about this particular grape varietal. Wine lovers are nothing if not pasionate. Every summer McMinnville hosts an International Pinot Noir Celebration. There's no shortage of passion there.

Maybe it's because passions can be fleeting. As we look back over the last five years of mud and back breaking work to bring our vineyard, Hess Creek Vineyard and winery, 240 Wineworks into production, we've had many opportunities to fall in love with something less demanding or at least less dirty. But we're still at it. This doesn't feel like passion: more like some kind of obsession or disease with no cure. But whatever it is, we’ve got it bad.

We could have built a big house with beautiful landscaping and paid someone to grow our grapes and make our wine. Lots of people do around here. Five years into this, we sometimes wonder why we didn't.

Cornelius says "Hi!" while Picador ponders his
paws...

But no, we get our hands dirty. Our nails haven’t been clean in years and we own more rubber boots than the city of Venice during Aqua Alta.  Our vineyard surrounds our modest house (i.e. double-wide) which is half buried under about 20 vole hunting cats and all the equipment it takes to manage a vineyard. 

But don't let the humble exterior fool you. We are meticulous about our viticulture and fastidious about our wine. Along the way, we learn, we try, we fail, and we succeed.  And, in the end, our wine is our wine.

It is a bottle of our experience. Share it with us.