Wine and Corn

I realized something interesting earlier this spring.

Growing up I’m pretty sure I disappointed my dad in a lot of ways. He wasn’t happy unless he was grinding dirt into the grease deeply embedded in the creases and calluses on his hands. Me? From the first things I can remember I was into every gadget and technology I could get my hands on in the early- and mid-eighties.

Dad would read Indiana Prairie Farmer. I would read Popular Science and Compute. Until the day he died he would tell the story of how he tried to take me deer hunting. He’d laugh until he’d cry telling everyone how I scared all the deer away because I brought comic books stuffed down inside my orange hunting overalls and ruffled the pages while we sat in the weeds waiting for a buck.

So when it came to farming, it was pretty apparent from an early age that I wanted nothing to do with nitrogen and potash and hybrid corn seeds and watching the market for the right time to sell beans. Now give me a good D&D game on the computer? Hell yeah, I’ll see you on Thursday after I’ve beaten it twice. I remember growing up and really wanting nothing more than to escape that hot, dusty, pollen-filled corner of Indiana.

That sentiment stuck with me for the better part of thirty years. Not for lack of trying, I just didn’t understand my dad. It was corn. In dirt. Big deal. Don’t know how he could get so excited about it all.

But then a couple years ago a random series of events started a chain reaction. Butterfly effect, if you will. Follow along here, I promise it’ll loop back and make some sense. A buddy of mine from here in Indy got transferred to the west coast for his job. He was an amateur wine snob, and had about a hundred bottles of wine sitting in his apartment that he couldn’t take with him. I have a huge basement and said sure, he could keep his wine in a corner of the basement until his six months were up and he moved back.

Fast forward a year and the buddy’s job changed, he’d met a girl, and was now a permanent resident of San Francisco living in a couple-hundred-square-foot apartment. We were talking one evening and he said, “You know, bro. All that wine. You can just keep it I guess. Only a few bottles are really good stuff, and it would cost way too much to ship it all out here.”

Huh, cool. I don’t think I’d ever drunk more than a half a glass of wine in my life. But over the next few months Kelly and I opened a few bottles here and there and I started to develop a taste for it. Time-jump again a couple years later and this is our basement…

John & Kelly’s wine cellar.

Soooo yeah, I guess when I go in, I go all in.

But all that lead-up is to get to this point. Last spring Kelly and Molly and I were out in Paso Robles visiting a couple winery-owner friends of ours. First time we’d ever stayed on an actual winery grounds, so we had the whole place to ourselves. It was early in the season, just coming up on bud-break, and there was a ton of work going on in all the vineyards preparing for the upcoming growing season.

Walking the hills in the evenings with a bottle of wine, seeing all the fresh growth. Smelling the dry dust of the calcareous soil. It clicked. Oh. Oh. OH! THIS is what Dad felt! For the first time in my life I saw that intimate connection between the earth and the farmer and the plants. That beautiful symbiosis that entranced my dad way back in 1933 and followed him the rest of his life.

Sunset at Rotta Winery in Paso Robles, CA. Look closely and you can see the first shoots after bud-break.

I’m still a tech-geek at heart. I work in IT and have a 49” monitor spanning my entire desk, which is stacked with three laptops, a phone, and a tablet. But right in front of my keyboard is a tiny snip from a Paso Robles Zinfandel grape vine. And right behind my work chair on my bookshelf is an antique Ball jar full of corn from the last harvest that Dad pulled in himself before he retired.

I get it now.

And looking forward into this next phase of the farm, that’s why we chose ‘Helios’. All the wineries have names. It’s a matter of marking out that patch of earth and naming its purpose. Not its owner. Its purpose. For decades in Dad’s eye it was just “the farm.”

Now it’s evolving.

It’s something more.

We’re farming the sun itself.

We are Helios.