Farming

I.

We want our food to be simple, perfect, and rustic. That requires great ingredients, and unless you grow them yourself, great ingredients are hard to find. This is really the reason my family started Idiot’s Grace, to make sure that our own table was always provided with flavorful, well-farmed food. In the tradition of our region, we farm orchard crops including cherries, pears, apples, and quince, but it is wine grapes, and winemaking, that lets this place endure.

Wine is a food made over a long time. Years elapse between planting a grape vine and tasting the wine made from its fruits, and it takes years more to understand the character of the grape as it expresses itself here. Only with patience and effort can we learn what grapes will be right for a place, and only with wild fermentation can we make a wine that is truly at home at Idiot’s Grace.

We have been farming these fifty acres since 2002, and our project is still experimental. The Columbia Gorge is a wine region in its infancy, and we suspect the lasting character of the wine tradition here has not yet been discovered. Three generations of my family have given their time to Idiot’s Grace, and we work knowing that this project will outlast those who first imagined it. It is with an intent focus on the long view that we farm twenty-four varieties of wine grapes, and that we so restlessly play with our practices and techniques in both the field and the cellar. There is no shorter path; this is what it takes to help raise the young tradition.

II.

Much ado is made of cellars, yet the heart of this work happens in the field, where we steer the agrarian ecosystem for biodiversity and beauty. Our farming is organic and undogmatic. We are low-input as a matter of both ethics and economy. We try to be scientific in our management, but we take on faith the idea that anyone seeking to make expressive, original wines will need grapes grown in a complex and active community of living things. The farm is certified organic.

III.

We farm wine grapes, cherries, and pears on a commercial scale, but we are habitual planters, and today we grow a few hundred varieties of fruiting trees and vines. When the harvest inspires a good idea, the fruit makes it to the tasting room kitchen, and from there to the menu.

Our oldest cherry trees have been here for more than a hundred years, and though their wide spacing and low production makes farming them an anti-economical choice, they still produce delicious cherries, so they stay. Among and between the established blocks we interplant hedges and gardens of herbs, shrubs, and trees.

IV.

There is a huge catalog of words now in use to describe different kinds of farming, but in general the words are neither precise nor vital enough for what they describe. The texture of living earth underfoot, the sounds and sights of a varied countryside, and certain seasonal smells are better, I think, than the explanations and certifications. We invite you to visit Idiot’s Grace, walk around, and get a sense for the place.