Ten years

What do you say when you haven't spoken for so long? I think about that. It's good to be back.

The last few months have been the busiest of my life, wonderfully so. It just can't go on like this forever, working a full time job, making and selling my own wine, working as a partner in another wine business, not to mention duties at home as father and husband. It's a little crazy to be honest.

But it represents something I set out to do ten years ago that actually came to pass, by hard work, persistence really, and definitely a lot of patience. I wouldn't want it any other way.

I kind of have a thing about remembering dates in my life. So it strikes me today that exactly ten years ago, after a tumultuous Thanksgiving weekend where I was preoccupied with taking a job I didn't want just because I thought (with some prompting) that we could use the higher salary, I drove home from the final interview and had what you might call a "come to Jesus" moment. 

In the old Honda, driving home on I-5 through north Portland on a grey Monday morning, I committed to a life in wine. I thought, I have a job that I'm pretty good at, with a lot of flexibility and paid time off. Why not use that to work days and even harvest seasons in wine? Who knows where it might lead? Certainly it would be better than that shit job that could have ruined everything.

I had no idea anything would actually come of it. And I don't think anyone in my life - including me - really knew what I was doing. It seemed so far fetched to make my own wine commercially some day that I didn't exactly declare that goal to anyone, for a while anyway.

I just went for it, getting more involved in the local industry in many different ways, the stories of those years recorded here by intention and chance.

I started this blog pretty soon after this day ten years ago. I thought that I'd write to process what I was learning and doing in wine, and I'll admit I thought maybe someone who was searching for me would find it and get a really good sense of where I was coming from in wine.

Ten years have gone by so quickly and I still feel like I've only just begun, perhaps like a vineyard that takes years to bear fruit and then a few years more to really start hitting its stride. 

So it's good to be back writing. And better to think of what's to come next.