Beginnings

I was born in the Central Valley, in Woodland. As a kid, my folks took me up to my grandparents' ranch almost every weekend. Their young walnut orchard sprawled along a southern ridge overlooking the Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River, in El Dorado County. My mom's side of the family homesteaded there in the foothills of the Sierras late in the 1800's.

My sisters, my cousins & I picked walnuts in the fall. We earned 25 cents per 5 gallon bucket, and three bucketfulls went into a burlap sack. With hands blackened by the walnuts' stain, we tied our nametags onto our sacks. Grandma tallied them up as we drove along in the fading autumn light, stacking the sacks on the old wooden trailer. One year, I bought a new bike with my earnings.

Walnuts are different in many ways from grapes, but having grown up learning to drive a tractor, dry-farming the dusty red soil, I jumped into growing grapes with more enthusiasm than sensible trepidation when my wife and I purchased an abandoned dairy ranch located west of Petaluma, in Sonoma County.

On my dad's side, the family had been in California even longer than on my mom's side. My great-great grandfather, Jackson Temple, took passage on a Clipper Ship from Massachussetts to the Isthmus of Panama, where he disembarked and hiked across to the Pacific Ocean. From the western shores of the Isthmus, he sailed north to San Francisco, settling first on his brother's farm located west of Petaluma in 1851.