Patrick Flannery, Cultivating Relationships and Grapes | July 1, 2019

[Music] my name is pat flannery and i was the ashland ymca executive director from 1977 to the end of 1982. prior to coming to ashland i was the assistant executive director for the westchester y in la and was hired by john strandberg and barbara allen to come to ashland so in june of 1977 i came up here for an interview it was 109 degrees when i got here and i was trying to impress these people about what a good why person i was and they took me out to the y on this dusty road at that point the the bridge over the railroad tracks on ashland street or 66 was an old wooden bridge and the y was in a small building that's still there and so john strandberg barbara allen and trenton douglas interviewed me and along with some of the other board members and after they got done with the interview they had me go over to the oak tree barbara allen's husband gerald owned the oak tree restaurant which is now um i can't remember the current name of it but i went there and they they thought about it and decided that they wanted me to have the job and they said can you start next week and i said no i you know it's june it's the beginning of summer there's all this stuff going on at the so i'll come up on labor day and i'll start on labor day and so i went back to la and uh the beginning of september i packed everything in my car and drove back up here and they had found me a house that i could live in so i was all set as far as having a place to live and i started working at the ymca and in those days the local y was primarily soccer they had a lot of soccer programs for kids in the community five acre piece of land with the building on the front and so a little background on how they even needed a new y director what happened is in the the ymca movement in order to be an executive director at the y you have to meet certain education qualifications which involves also some why background work different classes you have to take and the person that was running the y at that time did not have that background and the national y said either you hire an executive director that has the background or you're going to lose your charter as a ymca prior to me it was um jan patterson whose husband owned the glass company in town which is currently where standing stone is that used to and i don't think it was called patterson glass but it was a big glass company in town that did all the windows and doors and and window replacements on cars and and so she was the y director and prior to her it was don cowan and don had moved here from canada and he ran the y for a number of years but ran into conflicts with b.j holland and so you have to go back a ways bj was the presbyterian minister in town well respected individual he was the one that succeeded in getting the y building built out on 66 um because you persuaded george hunter to donate the money it was bj they got george to donate the money for hunter park and for the ymca and so bj had a big influence on the y and when i came there the y was pretty much debt free because of george hunter and um so bj was a member of the board the thing that's interesting is so that if you went out and looked at the old ymca building the y building was in the city all the property behind the ymca was in the county and all of the property around the ymca was in the county and in those days you know we're talking 10 000 people lived in town tolman creek and 66 there were no signals the only thing that was out there was by mart and lush schwab those were the only two stores there was no shopping cart albertsons wasn't there and behind the ymca was an old the original city dump is located down on tolman creek behind the ymca and the guy that owned that property would dig up glass bottles and he had a little glass shop and people would go there to buy old antique bottles that he had dug out of the dump and so that was that area of town in 1977. so i i came here and uh you know i i had an administrative assistant that worked part-time and a person that came through i can't remember what the federal program was but there was a federal program that helped non-profits that would hire somebody to assist you and he was the soccer guy that helped with soccer and other youth programs and so in those days we started winding guides and all the programs that the y did and mike murphy who was the medford y director was a good friend of mine prior to that mike and i were both hired by the same guy to go to work for the y within six months of each other so part of the reason i even got up here was because of mike and he said you know pat is probably a guy that we should look at so when i got here barbara allen john strand by the way john strandberg is uh jason strandberg's grandfather so john owns associated insurance with george shuu and barbara was a real estate person husband gerald owned the oak tree they had they had prior to that owned where the um oh it's hard to describe but right across the street from uh market of choice used to be a place called um the rats motel even though that wasn't the name of it but the thing was infested with rats and so barbara and gerald you know had a little um like a w stand there and they moved from there out to doing the oak tree so she was a real estate person and anyway that was the beginning of the ymca and we had some great board members and at this point my memory it's hard to remember them all but pete hawes who was a big ymca soccer guy was on our board and like i mentioned bj holland uh gill plunkett uh the plunkett center at sou so gil was on our board and so they early on said you know what we want to do is we want to build a swimming pool we don't have a swimming pool in town we want to have a swimming pool so we began the process of working towards a capital campaign to build a swimming pool and uh my one of the the things that makes a good ymca director is having a strong development background if you can raise money the odds are you're going to be a pretty good ymca director so we started out doing what we call current support campaigns every year to raise money to help kids that couldn't afford come to y programs and we gradually increase the size of the staff so i hired senior program director pete morris that came to us out of southern california and then ben benjamin was hired then was here in town after he left the y went to work for access so ben was one of our program directors we hired a full-time uh administrative assistant who wound up going to work for shakespeare after uh things got a little shaky at the y she went to as the secretary of the development director at shakespeare so so anyway we started we did annual fundraising efforts and started working on a swimming pool and the board evolved and we got new people more influential people in towns wayne smith was on our board at one time um dave fort miller at fort miller's department store dom provost and joyce provost and you know we're in those days so the rotary club met at the steakhouse and today people go to the steakhouse so where the provost building is which is now the big art center right next door up the street was a steakhouse had a big huge sign on the roof and in the old days when traffic went both ways on siskiyou boulevard you know people from out of town would stop there and have lunch and dinner and that's where the rotary club met and i can remember a guy was early i was must have been here a month or two and i did a slide show for the rotary club and gary prickett was the uh president of the rotary club at that time so it was 1977 might have been early 1978 and i didn't have any slides so i pulled slides from my old y stuff out of la and showed these slides and you know gary came to me i said you know pat you maybe you should get some slides that do a better job of representing ashland and i said well i'll try in the future but i hadn't been and you know at that point it was sort of i was the jack of all trades the guy we had soccer on saturday on friday i was the guy that mowed the soccer fields and we irrigated with tid water so when the irrigation system failed i was the guy that had to fix it or find somebody to help me fix it so anyway it was uh a quite a complete different experience than working for a y in los angeles which were you know we were talking big huge ymcas with lots of staff and and it was pretty much just you know when something happened i was the guy that got called so we worked on uh raising the money to do the swimming pool and uh the decision was finally made instead of just doing the pool why don't we do a complete ymca so we were going to put in a gymnasium an indoor swimming pool racquetball courts a couple of locker rooms it would be a real nice facility well we had a number of hurdles the first hurdle was people when we went out to start doing um a study whether we could do this or not people said the y is too far out of town nobody's going to go to the y why would anybody drive all the way out there to go to the ymca you need to move that y closer to town so at that point chuck lamarr who was the president of heritage bank and i went about trying to find a place closer to town that we could put the ymca and we looked at a number of different places and realized that we it just wasn't we weren't going to be able to do it the cost where the baseball fields are for sou right across from the middle school at that that one triangle we looked at it in fact john maurer who was on our board went up in his plane and took the photos of the property we were going to do that and the pearsons owned the property across east maine next to the old house i can't remember the name of the people that owned that house but we were going to um put the y next to that but no sight seemed to be appropriate so we wound up saying you know that the property we have on 66 is valuable enough that we should sell that property and buy the property behind so the seven and a half acres behind the ymca we um bought which included part of the dump so the sock underneath the soccer fields is the old city dump and at that point there were only a couple of houses on tullman creek there was nothing i mean we're talking out in the country we actually bought the land yeah so but you know it didn't cost a lot of money and um so we bought it with the intent that we would annex it into the city and build the y there but you know so then we went to the city who said we want to annex the property and the city said well you know the problem is we don't have a lot of water and we really don't think we have enough water to accommodate the inclusion of this piece of property into the city and i said well how about if we drill a well and they okay you can try it so we drilled a well and the and i think the y is still using the well 350 gallons a minute from the swell it was the most incredible well it would it would supply at that time you know a third of the water for the whole city of ashland came out of this well and so we finally were able to persuade the city to let us um get the property in annex into the city and then we went about the fundraiser we needed 2.4 million we raised a million dollars so the challenge was how are we going to get to 2.4 million now in hindsight you know i should have just scrapped the whole thing and put the pool behind the existing white building and i said that's it but we felt strongly enough that this would be something that the community would use the community would want and so we went about um trying to get financing to borrow what we couldn't didn't raise and you know pay it off through operating revenues banks interest rates at that point were 15 to 18 percent in fact the united way director at that time stopped me on the street and said you know i just bought a cd at 20 interest and he said isn't that great and if you know it was if you think of it oh my gosh they're getting 20 off your investment but we couldn't um find a bank that would loan us the money and when we couldn't find a bank to loan us the money people started backing out on their pledges to pay the money and so then we started having a spiral effect where um we just you know didn't have the money to do what we wanted to do we now had this new piece of property we started grading it to put soccer fields in there and we eventually sold the property right next to the ymca to mcdonald's sold the ymca to a guy from maine who was a survivalist we didn't know why he wanted it but he stored a whole bunch of camping gear in the downstairs and never used the building and um that helped pay back the loans that we had had with heritage bank to buy the new piece of property and keep the ymca operating and then um it just 1982 it became obvious that we weren't going to be able to do it and why would have to scale back and go back in essence to the way it was when i got here a small operation one person running it and now the dilemma as we know didn't have a building so we're operating out of a house on 66 a couple of blocks the other side of the railroad tracks and um so um ben went to work for access pete went to work for a ymca in l.a and the end of december 1982 i went back to la and and worked for the ymc and the san fernando valley the mid valley ymca yeah you still have that piece of property in the back though yeah yeah and it was at that point we had converted it to soccer fields and so what happened you know after i left is the the why with the effort of bruce and mary berkstrom who were on the board they really had to struggle with what can we do to keep the y afloat and the y had been moving from place to place and you know we also had a very good preschool julia dutsen was our preschool director did an outstanding job and so they said well we need to get rid of these soccer fields we cannot afford to you know maintain them so they gave the property to the city with the understanding that the city would keep them as soccer fields ymca park which is what it was called for years and that took a lot of the financial burden off of the uh the y and after i left carol jensen came in carol had been a y director in san luis obispo and so she um her parents live here yeah you know i know there's i know too many things about too many other so her brother is d chrisley who was a doctor i still is a doctor in town i think so um her mom in fact mary chris lee i think worked at sou and so carol ran the ymca i went to la and after six years of being in la i said you know i don't want my kids to go to to junior high school in la i'm going to quit the y and i'm going to move back to ashland so i quit the y moved back to ashland and for a period of about six months i didn't do anything and then bruce on sawyer paddles and oars makes uh river rafting paddles noirs and so i went to work for him up in rogue river did that for a year and then the job opened up in the hospital and because of my back you know people i knew uh chuck butler jed meese sid deboer i sort of got the job at the hospital and so i did that for 17 years and worked at the hospital and now i'm a vineyard guy so but you know there were a lot of people back in my y days in ashland that put their heart and soul into that ymca and i'm glad it's successful and it it proves to all of them that it really did have meaning and it could happen so and the who's who of ashland went down the drain you know the the um the bank had been started by uh five very influential people in ashland who also were very involved with the ymca dom provost um chris hall you know dr hall the [Music] the gal that owned the uh pink church which is now the cabaret and i can't remember her name it's what happens when you get old you can't you know one point i knew all these people but i can't remember them now left yeah i left in uh actually i started the job in la on the second of january 1983 and i left um in august of 1989 and came back up here and started working with bruce in the winter of 89 it might have been january of 90 and i got the job at the hospital in october of 1990 but it's interesting that we have people like you know john maurer was on the board and i was there and now he's back on the board and pete hawes was on the board and i think pete hawes is back on the board and you know john strandberg's grandson's on the board and you know so it's interesting how yeah you know it just stays with but you know john strandberg and barbara allen put a lot a lot of time and effort into that why so the one of the big insurance companies in town at that time was reinhold o'hara insurance and it was bob reinhold and bob o'hara and bob's o'hara's wife marjorie was also involved with the y so barbara's last maiden name is skinner her last name is skinner and but um gerald allen's sister is barbara who's uh meister so meisters by right the original steve meister's their son but um so uh i can't remember i think it's uh his dad's name is dick but so dick meister married barbara allen yeah so barbara allen then became meister and barbara skinner married gerald and became barbara allen [Laughter] but what saved ashland was the bowmer theater in 1968 69 ashland was in pretty bad shape a lot of downtown was boarded up um there what happened when when the elizabethan stage was open things were wonderful september at close everybody's gone and so uh the population when i got here was ten thousand so it might have been eight thousand but uh when the bomber was built which it's the same kind of thing as with the y so um um bill patton tried to raise the money to build the the bowmer theater couldn't raise the money and went to the city and i think brian had just come brian actually came from westchester so brian amquist came from the same area of la that i came from bill went to the city and said you know we need this i can't do it with um donations alone i need the city's help to to float a bond issue to pay for this and um what the shakespeare did is signed all the assets of shakespeare over to the city in exchange for a bond issue that built the bomber theater and i seriously think if the bomber had not been built ashland would have been you know it would have gone even further down than it was at that point but the minute bomber opened now you have plays that start earlier because there's indoor and they last longer more people come to town it became and you know between bill patton who you know so bill was a y member and um he never came to the y and so i said you know bill why are you a y member and he said well when shakespeare sends me to new york to do play analysis i stay at the ymca for free because i'm a y member but he was so frugal that he would not spend any of shakespeare's money to go traveling around and so he he uses y membership card to stay at ymcas all over the united states for free because he was a wyoming member so but yeah so um it behance and i didn't mention that part but our last gasp was the same thing i went to brian i said you know brian let's float a bond issue we'll sign all the assets of the y over to you float a bond issue get this thing done it'll be a great thing for the community and um ron salter i think was a city attorney at that point and i can't remember the all the details but it was decided that it just couldn't be done and we had actually gotten to the point where we had started the campaign for yeses we had a big banner across downtown that said vote yes on the ymca and we're going to you know have a bond issue to raise the money to build y and that went nowhere so that was you know the other thing that we tried to do was merge with medford so i actually put together a big proposal on forming the rogue valley ymca which is now called the rogue valley why but that day it wasn't the rogue valley y and the plan was ashland medford grants pass would all become one big organization to reduce the overhead you know have you have one big corporate board and you have small community boards to run the individual wise but the medford board wouldn't go for it so so i tried pretty much anything and everything i could think of to do but but ashland was so you know in those days uh christmas shopping they had men's night out and women's night out and so downtown all the um the stores i i'm one night before christmas so only the men were allowed to go down to town and shop and another night only the women were and they'd you know shop for their their partner so but so yeah ray jackson and mary kay they owned uh mary kay owned the country girl which was a store in downtown ashland and ray had a men's clothing store that also was in downtown ashland eventually moved to member jackson's men's store i'm pulling things that probably nobody today has ever heard of sort of like the steakhouse well that's changed over that period of time what else do you remember um you know the the thing i remember more than anything else is that there were no stop signs you know that if it was pretty much and it when the sun went down there was nobody around you know uh vic lively was the chief of police so actually vikka ivy was a sergeant was working on our campaigns helping the y because of the work we were doing with kids in the community and while he was involved with the y the chief of police had a heart attack and died and vic became chief of police i can't remember what year that was but he stayed actively involved with the y his son david lively uh was also when so when vic was chief david was probably 12 years old and what we do is pete morris would take his um junior high group and they'd go up in the hills and cut christmas trees and then they'd sell them at one of the shopping centers out where um where the cinema is today that was a supermarket and so they'd give them part of the parking lot they saw christmas that's how the kids would raise money for summer camp the next summer so where'd you go for camps where did we go well we used the uh the the medford y had a camp that was at um hyatt howard prairie in those days so we'd use that one and we'd also use the boy scout camp at lake of the woods so and we did a complete progressive camping program we started kids out in day camp and then they went from day camp to resident camp and they went from resident camp to backpacking camp where they would you know get more and more into nature and spend more time outside i used to run for seniors at camp outside of uh of sisters we'd do a week-long camp that was for senior citizens so take all your senior citizens when you go camping for a week and they'd stay in little cabins and you know get to swim and play cards in the evening and it was a great time so in i have some documentation from 1971 that shows ashland why it builds strong strong young men and strong bodies so there's a focus even as late as that on on the mail uh as a as a y member and mary bergstrom i think was instrumental in bringing women into the y is that is that can you talk well by telling what by the time i got here it was pretty much a family why so you know one of the greatest things that the national y did was change from young men's christian association to the why that uh you know when i was a little kid i went to the y 1 6 years old in the glendale y in in southern california and it was all boys and men women weren't allowed but in the early 60s the y made a decision a conscious decision to become a family oriented ymca and so they worked at providing activities for every member of the family so when i went to work for the y in 1970 it was family-wide in in southern california and when i came up here it was the same way we had um as many women involved in the why in fact we had probably more women involved than you know we did things like uh we had this program called rugrats where women could bring their newborns and do exercise programs and so we had all kinds of stuff but you know i mean i was pretty much it i was a guy i was doing all this stuff so and you know like i said it was uh it was out on the edge of town you know dusty you know i out of my office window in the first few months i you could see the coyotes out running across the soccer fields behind it and so when um you mentioned that you had the presbyterian minister on your board what was the church involvement at that time well there's still a in there in the national why today there's still um a um into the words not christian but a uh faith belief that you know the the y tries to um impart spirit mind and body so that your um regardless of what your spirituality is you can find a place in the y one of my best friends who was the president of the lawy is jewish and uh he he wrote an article years ago where he said where is it written that you can't be jewish and have a christian philosophy on life and so there there was a you know we did prayers before board meetings and we did prayers when we went to camp and but it was more of a prey the way you feel like praying not a uh strict presbyterian methodist catholic view on the world so but yeah bj uh bj had been involved in the y for years before that he was i mean that that y between his passion and george hunter's money that's why the y was there so because the y used to be i i'm sure you've got it somewhere um where the um um i don't know if they call it the bowmer society right across from the the bowmer theater that that's where the ymca used to be in that old building which has been remodeled about 60 times since then but yeah any other local churches involved they were but you know i can't rem i can't remember do you recall basketball do you call church organized basketball well we did in those days we called it yba youth basketball association and yeah we used so part of the thing that shocked me when i came to ashland is every elementary school has a gymnasium you don't have that in l.a you know and part of it's because it's not you know 10 degrees in the winter time so kids play outside but it was like oh my gosh so we'll you know so we ran the yba program in all the elementary schools there were five of them that point and uh you know as volunteer coaches and uh we had basketball just like we had soccer we had a basketball program so that's pretty much it [Music] so i i interviewed for the hospital job in the summer of 1990 and parker mccrary was the development director for rogue valley medical center and he applied for the job also and they offered him the job and he wouldn't accept it because of the pay and jim watson was a hospital administrator and he then offered me the job and i went in to meet with him he said the reason we didn't give the job to parker is because he wanted more money than i'm making so that's how i got the job the hospital was a department of the city of ashland it had been it had been since i've i you know i could spend hours jesse winburn winburn um street so jesse winburn came to town in the late um teens maybe early 20s and wanted to um build a big um house up on the hills the city wasn't going to let him do it so to try and sweeten the pot he the hospital had been privately owned he bought the hospital and gave it to the city and so we're um um the um college um the u-shaped what is the name of that building huh anyway that used to be where the hospital was it was called granite city hospital and so because of christman i can't remember christmas first name they decided in 19 late 1950s to move the hospital to the new location and which received about the same number of complaints as the y it's too far out of town nobody's going to go it's up on the hill he can't get there in the wintertime there's too much snow so anyway that became the new site for the hospital and um so our our goal was to raise money to try and improve the hospital you know in a time when it was getting more and more difficult to meet the funding requirements because of reduction in medicare and and insurance plans and i had an incredibly strong board so most if it most in fact lisa and i had to have an agreement that we couldn't have board meetings on the same day because if we had board meetings on the same day board members would have to decide where they wanted to go so um a lot of people that were on the y board were on the hospital foundation board and uh the dilemma that the um the hospital faced is if they wanted to do anything that involved acquiring land or building buildings that had to go to the city council and it became a difficult situation because then all the competitors knew what was going on before the hospital could actually make the move to do it and so the foundation started becoming the um the organization because we were a separate 511c3 that actually was had a mission of supporting the hospital but we had our own governing board so we were totally separate from the hospital with a goal of supporting a hospital so we'd started doing off-site development and bill and florence schneider donated a big piece of land thanks to chuck butler and all his efforts and that's where the retirement community is down at the bottom of maple street so that's the first project we did but when i got there we had about thirty thousand dollars in assets when i left we were close to 15 million and we owned pretty much all the land around the hospital everything around the hospital was owned by the foundation along with the big piece of property and talent where we had a medical office building there and the pharmacy and another building so we owned that and that too was because of chuck chuck uh a guy called him one day and said hey i've got this piece of land i want to get rid of all that you have a cheap chuck um put the down payment on and the foundation reimbursed him for it and he transferred it over but you know he he could have kept it himself and made a huge amount of money but he transferred over to the hospital foundation and we made a huge amount of money and all that money went back into supporting the hospital so we built the medical office building that's at the corner of maple and uh north main we built that uh medical office building the one right across the street val swanson was a physical therapist in town and at the corner of right it's right below the parking lot we built that building for the um the hospital yeah you know i had a pretty strong board and you know i was the only staff person so it was not like i could do it all myself so they were the nuts and bolts and they made everything happen i just was the guy that did the paperwork that helped them along in their effort to make the hospital a stronger facility and you know and i was long gone when asante bought ashland hospital but i've been told that a number of these assets were what persuaded asante to take ashland hospital if they hadn't been able to transfer those assets over to asante asante wouldn't have done it but it helped make the deal go through [Music] paula and paula brown's my wife so paula was the public works director i was working at the hospital we were living in quiet village is it still called quiet village okay and in 1999 late 1993 i said you know paula let's get out of the city let's move out to the country have a nice place where we can have privacy and you know we don't have people right next door to us and so i found this place and let's go look at it so uh ronda lewis was on the board and rhonda brought us up to this place and paula walked to the front door opened the door said absolutely not and closed the door and we went away and we looked for other places and nothing seemed to really so in the latter part of 1996 i said you know paula that house is still for sale let's go out and look at it one more time and now ronda was no longer bored carlene hester was on the board carlene is another real estate agent in town and so carlene brought us out we looked at it and i said you know i i think we can make this work uh paul says i don't know i said oh come on you know be it'll be fun it'll be an adventure so we wound up buying it it was in such bad shape but obviously in bad shape when you consider it was for sale from 1993 94 to 97 when we bought it and nobody everybody in town had looked at it nobody bought it so we had they the guy had put 12 inch pavers on the floor overloaded the floor so the floor sagged put you would in the master bedroom but laid it green so that you would shrunk so you'd get your toes stuck between the chunks so you would and anyway the list goes on and on but we um we fixed it up got the point we moved in and then looked outside and went oh my gosh we haven't paid any attention to the fact we have 13 acres of land that we haven't done a thing to because all we have is a little sears and roebuck push mower and with weeds the neighbors felt so bad for us they came up with their their brush hog and mowed along the edge of the road so we could at least get to the house and uh you know because you can't have 13 acres while a tractor and we didn't have a tractor so the next year we had to buy a tractor and then the other problem you know so there's all these things you don't think through so as you're probably well aware in oregon there's land use laws so this is what's called efu land exclusive farm use exclusive farm use land you have to produce a crop at least once in every five years or you potentially lose your tax deferment it's not forgiveness of property taxes a reduction in property tax because you're feeding the masses by growing something on your property and we hadn't been growing anything and then the tid guy because we have tid water kept calling me going uh pat we need to know what uh kind of crop you produced last year because if if you don't grow a crop you don't you're not qualified for water and then you five years of no crop yet so we tried different kinds of hay and that didn't work and we tried echinacea and that didn't work and finally paula was gone she was with the navy she was actually in iraq and we talked once a week and i said you know maybe we should revisit doing grapes and she goes you're kidding me you said you didn't want to do grapes because you didn't want all these people on the property and now you want to do grapes and i said well but i don't know what else to do and she says okay so at that point at a time greg jones geologists at sou had a side business called cascade environmental and so i hired him he came out he does soil test solar access elevation and he'll tell you number one whether you can grow grapes and if you can grow grapes what varietals he thinks would work and so i he the good news was we could grow grapes the bad news was i didn't know which grapes to plant you know i i'm a pbr kind of guy pabst blue ribbon so i i took this report and i went over to jack day and michael donovan jack they and michael was working for jack at roxanne i said okay guys what would you grow if you were planting today and they said well i think i'd grow malbec tempranillo and vlna so i came home and i i said to greg okay i think i've got it now what do i do and he said well you need somebody to help you so um there is a guy named randy gold that has this company called um uh what's a company called pacific crest vineyard services and so call randy so i called randy randy came out and said yeah we can put it in and you know i think we'll run the rows north and south like greg said and so um in 2005 2006 we put in all the trellising and planted the grapes and wind up at that point selling grapes to wine makers who would you sell to those first couple years uh schmidt but the dilemma is you know so uh we're hoping we're going to make money off this even though it um it qualifies it meets the efu thing and the tid thing so you know initially randy comes out and says you know pat you're probably gonna have about uh four tons to the acre and i'm going oh good four tons two thousand dollars a ton eight thousand dollar whoopee i'm gonna make some money well the thing that i didn't realize is that a point in later july early august control of your vineyard goes to the person that you are selling the grapes to because they're interested in quality because they want to make wine under their label that somebody's going to buy so cal came out and said you know pat you need to drop fruit you're overloaded i said what do you mean drop fruit well you know you're you're two two two which is two clusters of grapes per shoot you need to be one one one so driving wait a second two two one one so instead of four tons per acre i'm only going to get two tons of the acre and all of a sudden so so this one andre you know i mean i it annie's right and you have to do that but at that point i was stupid so after a couple years um the next door neighbor wanted to sell and we could tell he really didn't want to sell but he put it up for sale and it sat there for a year nobody bought it and so i went to paul and i said you know paula if we made our own wine instead of just selling the grapes we'd make a lot more money even though we're not making money at all so we we went and talked to said zia owned the place next door we talked to sed and came to an agreement he sold us the property with the understanding that he could stay in the house for five years we'd start putting in the vineyard and he'd stay in the house and um and we'd grow grapes and make wine and and sell grapes so but the dilemma of the whole thing is um everything's front end loaded so you you know paid there's a capital outlay to put the whole thing in there's the expense to grow the grapes there's the expense to make the grapes in the wine there's expense for the bottle the label the cork and that little steel thing that goes over called a capsule you get all that done and then for a red it's got to sit for two three years in a bottle to age to the point where it's perfection and then somebody pulls the cork and goes this stuff's terrible and then what do you do thank goodness we haven't had that happen yet but that's the you know the fear that always goes floating around in your mind is there's no guarantee about what the wine is going to taste like until you pull the cork and taste it and we finished the tasting room in 2006. so what happened was um we bought that property in 2008 said in maryland were going to stay there until five years for five years and we actually thought you know when five years up they could stay you know they sort of become our adopted parents you know and then marilyn had a stroke which was shocking because she was the active one said didn't do anything just sat around so she had a stroke and within six months was dead and we were in the process of planting you know each year we'd plant a little more next door and said came to us and said i'm leaving and we said well where are you going and he said the philippines my kids hate me i don't want to live here i met a girl online i'm moving to the philippines and said was 82 and the girl was 37 with four kids in cebu city and we went uh no you know because he's sort of now our adopted dad we said said why don't you have her come over here first you know we can meet her you can meet her and see what this is like see if it'll work before you you know dry you fly all the way to the philippines okay so months go by and we hear no more so we went over one day and said so said what's happened with the girl coming well i sent her five thousand dollars but she can't get out of the philippines or like oh this just does not sound good at all so we tried to talk about he said no i'm going so he had one final party on the 4th of july in 2011 and his kids came his the son and daughter came all the grandkids came and his son drove into the greyhound bus station in medford and he took the ground bus to san francisco now you ask why did he take the ground bus he said well if i take the ground bus i can sleep on the bus and it gets there in the morning and it's right by the philippine consulate so i can go in and get my passport visa to go to it and i don't have to pay for a motel room so he saves all his money you know he's and so he took the ground to san francisco got his visa went off to cebu city the gal's 17 year old son met him at the airport picked him up and he is the happiest guy in the world she takes care of him he's built a house for expats in cebu city and you know every once in a while i get an email from he says this is the greatest life i've ever had now you could think things could have gone a lot worse than they did but they have turned out perfect for them so anyway the law so then it was like okay now we've got this house which i could spend an hour and a half talking about the house so imagine you know i mean you're talking about a a five-bedroom four-bath house that he takes one suitcase and leaves so you know the beds are unmade there's clothes hanging in the closets the dishes are in the sink dirty the dishwasher hadn't been run the stove has pans with grease in it and it was just like oh anyway so we took months to um get it all cleaned up and chris adderson was our general contractor that did all the finished work you know put all window windows and doors and but uh when you walk into the living room that's pretty much the way the living room was the fireplace was there the bar wasn't there but the fireplace was there the kitchen was part of the living room the two handicapped bathrooms was one of the bedrooms and um but we had to stop planning to put the money into doing the tasting room so we opened in february of 13 the tasting room so and there are pictures over there of the you know going through before and after of what the place looked like but you're a hell of a storyteller well that's a so when we um when uh we first got the property we you know the thing was we're going first thing you have to do when you take land and you and you plant grapes you have to rip the ground so you bring in a big huge cat and it has big tongs on the back that go down four or five feet into the ground and they break up all the soil well in the process of breaking up the soil we pulled off the ground 450 tires and so what we figure he did is when he so he bought the property from don maddux and knew very little about farming but he uh flood irrigated so what we figured he did is he if you take a tire to the dump it's like three or four dollars and if you had no idea what i was getting into and if you put us you know so we think he put a sign down at the that at the uh road said i'll take your tires for two bucks and so he made money and then he got tires that he used for the berms for his uh flood irrigation and uh yeah we had so down by the the gate down there we have for years we had all those tires stacked up until i finally found a concrete plant in redding that uses tires for um for biomass to generate electricity and you have to pay them but you you don't have to pay them five bucks a piece like you do at the dump you pay them i think it was a buck and a half two bucks a pizza and they come pick them up because you in california if you transport more than two or three tires the state police will stop you because people are dumping tires so you have to have a permit to transport it's more than anybody needs to know about tires we wanted to have wine under our label so initially he made so many cases of wine under our label which really helped because when we opened the tasting room we then had wine to sell a lot of people in their tasting room and especially the reds aren't ready to be um so so anyway cal schmidt made wine for us for a while and then one year we had so much vlad that he couldn't take it all he had a fermentation tank that would hold 800 gallons and we had about twice that so we picked the fruit and we trucked it out there he couldn't take it so i called linda donovan at pallet wine company and linda says sure i'll take it so then we started using linda and um we had a couple of years where linda made all our wine a couple of years where she made part of it and cal made part of it and now linda's doing all of it so starting in uh 16 she's um doing all our wine so tell me about your wines tell me about your wines and what you love about you of course we knew nothing about wine going into this thing but the thing we've learned is you cannot be um stubborn and uh try and over produce so if we're if we're um not selling any fruit if we're everything's going to us we do one cluster per shoot and we expose our grapes to more sun in the in the late summer so we we pull leaves off on the um eastern exposure of the vines which um it heightens the flavor of the wines we believe it does and um so we try to make uh 200 to 250 cases of each varietal and we feel we can sell that through our tasting room and we try and grow varietals that are unique that um the average person that comes into the tasting room would say i've never heard of that so when we started doing malbec tempranillo and bna it was that but now it's sort of like everybody's doing it so we um then we planted mo vedra carbonare tanat uh saab blanc a lot of people do but our saab blanc has more uh flavor to it your your typical saab blanc is a grassy new zealand style saw block that's picked at 18 to 19 bricks which is the sugar content we let it hang longer try and pick it at 22 23 bricks so you get more flavors in it and we grow verdejo so and we're looking for torrante's but we can't find a place to get it toronte's is a a very prominent south american white so we don't rush our wines we try and keep them in fermentation as long as possible we don't add anything to the preparation of our wines no yeast everything's natural and um so like with our reds we keep them in a barrel for almost two years in a bottle for two years or longer before we sell them and that softens the tannins so you don't have as much bite on the back of your tongue and we feel gives you a more flavorful wine so and paula does all the labels and we have a staff that runs a tasting room which is a wonderful staff of people and you beg the question and i only ask it i never do but you beg the question whether you're making money now no so uh there was a guy that used to work at troon this is a number of years ago and he said you know the great business is like panning for gold the only guys making money are the guys selling picks and shovels because the reality is uh everything i went through before you know the bottle the cork everybody gets paid and then it sits and you're only um as successful as the consumer and likes your wine [Music] you