on a busy state highway, we had great visitor potential. We decided to build a tasting room, although no other Oregon winery had more than a converted garage for the public to visit. Our marketing consultant advised us that a tasting room would be an indispensable public-relations tool as well as a retail sales opportunity. It turned out to be one of the best pieces of advice we received.
A mutual friend introduced us to John Storrs, a Portland architect noted for his imagination and ability to design for the natural setting. John had designed several Oregon landmarks, the best known of which was Salishan Lodge, a resort on the coast that had become an instant mid-twentieth-century architectural classic. Tall, boisterous, and charismatic, John always dominated the space he was in. “Blueprints are just a formality,” he declared. He designed as he built. We enjoyed him and watched as he wandered around changing things after construction had begun—an opening here, a window there. He drove the builders crazy with his unconventional style. They grew to dread his visits, as they knew he would find something he wanted redone. But the result was better for it.
Our first wine label, with the SB logo and our winery name front and center. An exciting moment to see it on a bottle of our first Pinot Noir vintage.
In the summer of 1978, Sokol Blosser opened the first Oregon tasting room designed specifically for that purpose. The gray stucco building hugged the knoll and coordinated well with the gray concrete winery building. The existing large oak and maple trees and landscaping with native plants provided color and contrast. On a clear day, Mount Hood loomed majestically, perfectly centered in a large east-facing window. Besides a tasting area, we had a small kitchen, a tiny one-person office, and the requisite two bathrooms. The back door opened to a breezeway that connected the tasting room with the winery.
I ran the tasting room on weekends for the first few years. Behind me on the wall is a framed needlepoint my mother did for me. Underneath that are our first medals from wine competitions.
There was another door in the main tasting area, six feet off the ground, anticipating the big deck we wanted but couldn’t afford. That door remained nailed shut for the next twenty years until, in the late 1990s, the deck was finally added.
Once we had the tasting room, the challenge was to get people to visit on weekends, when we were open. Wine touring in Oregon was not yet in vogue. We sent out mailers to friends and friends-of-friends and threw a big party. Slowly the word spread. I spent weekends behind the bar welcoming people and pouring free tastes that we hoped would lead to sales. It was months before we could hire any help and years before we could be open more than weekends. The kids were always with us. During cherry season the first year, seven-year-old Nik demonstrated his entrepreneurial skills by showing up with fresh cherries from our orchard to sell to customers. Taking his cue from the way we worked the tasting room, he offered free tastes. He never failed to sell out.
THE EARLY WINEGROWERS IN the Willamette Valley were a close-knit group. We shared information and cooperated to chart a course for the new wine industry. This willingness to work together for the good of the whole became a distinguishing feature of Oregon winegrowers from the start. We understood our actions would shape the future and thought hard about what we wanted the Oregon wine industry to look like.
The whole industry, which was ten to twelve people in the early years, met regularly in each other’s living rooms, sitting around on mismatched thrift store furniture, a decor which we called “Contemporary St. Vincent de Paul.” First, we shared news of hot deals on equipment or supplies. Then, after passing along the address of a farmer who had stakes, wire, or used equipment for sale, we talked about what legislation we might need to protect our fledgling industry. Not every session ended in consensus, but we kept meeting until we reached it.
One issue with lasting effect was tightening Oregon’s labeling regulations. At the time, federal wine-labeling regulations were lax, shaped by the practices of industrial producers in California and New York. A winery could legally give a wine a varietal label, such as Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, when as little as 51 percent of the grapes in the bottle actually came from that variety. We didn’t want wineries compromising our reputations by labeling a wine “Pinot Noir” when 49 percent of it was made with less expensive grapes. Using cheap table grapes like Thompson Seedless would have been legal. We wanted the world to know that if the wine came from Oregon, virtually all the grapes would be the variety printed on the label.
Dave Adelsheim wrote up the regulations we had all agreed to and presented them to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), the state regulatory agency. The OLCC was not eager to have stricter laws than those required by the federal government, but with the whole Oregon wine industry behind the changes, it agreed. By the late 1970s, when our new regulations went into effect, any Oregon wine with a varietal label had to contain at least 90 percent of that variety. We made an exception for Cabernet Sauvignon, requiring only 75 percent, because in the grape’s French home, Bordeaux, similar varieties were often blended into the wine. Oregon’s stringent new labeling requirements influenced the federal rules, but not for another ten years. At that point federal regulations raised the requirement for varietals from 51 to 75 percent, better for consumers, but still far below Oregon’s standard. California and Washington winegrowers accepted the federal regulations. Only Oregon had tighter restrictions.
Another piece of the new regulations concerned generic wine names. As growers of Pinot Noir, the grape of Burgundy, we were outraged that some large California wineries would put a blend of cheap red grapes together and call it “Burgundy,” trading on the prestige of Burgundian wines and intimating that their product would taste as if it had been made of Pinot Noir grapes. So we devised a regulation that said Oregon wines could not be named for a geographic region unless all the grapes actually came from that place. This precluded labeling wines Burgundy, Chianti, Chablis, or Champagne—all names of wine regions in Italy or France. In reaching consensus on labeling regulations and persuading the government to implement them, the Oregon winegrowers demonstrated a level of cooperation and commitment rarely found in an industry whose members are ultimately in competition.
IN THE EARLY MONTHS of 1979, when Nik was eight and Alex was five, Bill and I suddenly realized that our boys were growing up fast. Bill commented he missed having a baby around and I surprised myself by admitting I did too. Impulsively, I stopped taking birth control pills and was soon pregnant. The boys were excited, since they were old enough to have proprietary interest in a new brother or sister. We had planned to tell Bill’s parents at a family gathering, but Alex, full of importance with his new knowledge, blurted out, “Mama’s going to have a baby!” to Grandma Betty and Grandpa John before we even got through the front door.
Because I would be thirty-five when the baby arrived, the age after which pregnancy was considered riskier, my doctor recommended that I undergo a new procedure, amniocentesis, to check the health of the fetus. I had the procedure, then waited six weeks, which seemed an eternity, for the report. After reassuring me about the baby’s health, the nurse who called asked if I wanted to know the baby’s sex. When she told me I was going to have a girl, I burst out crying. I hadn’t realized until then how much I had wanted a daughter.
Our baby girl arrived in December 1979. Alison was so much younger than her brothers, I worried they would boss her around—a predicament I knew well, growing up with three older brothers. But Alison seemed born to take charge and quickly proved she could hold her own. One night, when Bill and I had prevailed on the boys to babysit, we returned home to find four-year-old Alison clutching a large wooden spoon while playing Lego with her brothers. We knew something was up.
It turned out that after we had left, the boys had gone off to play, leaving Alison alone. She didn’t like being ignored and decided she wasn’t getting the babysitting to which she was entitled. So she got a wooden spoon