Posted by: John_Hamilton on 08/22/2012 12:51 PM
Updated by: John_Hamilton on 08/22/2012 12:51 PM
Expires: 01/01/2017 12:00 AM
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It Was 20 Years Ago Today... ~By Scott Klann
Murphys, CA...I’ve been eyeing this date on the calendar for the better part of the summer. It has finally arrived and I find myself in awe of life’s poignant cycles. In June of 1992 I left my beloved friends and second home in Long Beach, CA. These were/are people that I love dearly. They had helped me to see the world in new ways and to see that I was perfectly worthy of all that it had to offer. There was no plan, no grand scheme, other than a much needed inward look at what my life was going to be about. The only place to do that was under my father’s roof...the safest haven I had ever known....
My return there was at the same time both calming and foreboding. I was 23 years old and was seriously beginning to feel the need to find a calling. Music had always been a central focal point in my life but by this time I was aware that it was probably not going to be something that I would be successful at.
I picked up some work painting houses that summer...something I was DEFINITELY not interested in doing for very long. A friend had told me that a local winery was always looking for help this time of year for something called ‘Crush’. As I have often said, I knew nothing about wine at this point...I thought Chardonnay was the name of some guy who had his wine EVERYWHERE. So something called Crush was completely foreign to me.
The winemaker, Chuck Hovey (now a dear friend) and I hit it off well in my interview. He mentioned that I was welcome to come down and help out and he would call me when harvest was nearing. This was mid-July. Growing up in an rural area like Calaveras County, one would think I would be aware of the unknowns of farming. Nope. Weeks went by and I was beginning to think I had been blown off. No worries though...at this point I was not aware of what I would be missing. In mid August I finally got ahold of Chuck and asked if there was still a place for me.
Meanwhile a few days before that, our hot and dry foothill county began fighting a small but fierce fire right in its geographical center. It was dubbed the Old Gulch fire and within just a few days it had burned an astonishing 25,000 acres...right here in my home. However the hubris of youth combined with a total ignorance of my surroundings left me unaware that this fire was burning perilously close to the small winery that I was to be working at. Unbeknownst to me, several of my soon-to-be co-workers were on their feet 18 - 20 hours a day that week helping to save the winery and ultimately, the town of Murphys, from being consumed by the tasmanian devil-ish fire. In fact, the California Department of Forestry had decided that the winery and vineyards were the last line of defense before Murphys and that they would backfire from there into the main fire in order to burn the fuel behind the winery in order to save it.
One week later, CDF announced that they had a handle on the fire. I had reached Chuck a day earlier (himself having been up for days on end keeping the winery safe and as moist as possible). He mentioned that everyone had gone home to rest for a day before coming back in to work and that he could use some help getting set up for Crush.
And so it was, on this very day twenty years ago, August 22nd, 1992, I walked into Stevenot winery and into the wine business forever (to give you an idea of how much my life would be changed by this unique period of time, it would be only six more weeks before I met Melanie, my wife now of 18 and a half years).
I remember clearly my very first day in the winery. It was the day that my eyes had been opened. The idea that you could work under the hot sun, producing something that was grown in the ground(!) and turn it into this incredible and historical nectar that people freak out about...my goodness, sign me up! From my first moments in this business I found something that had been missing. I became a student of the industry, a wide-eyed neophyte and lifelong fanatic. And though some days are more challenging than others, I wake with that same enthusiasm every single day of my life. And I am grateful.
Those early days were incredibly formative times for me. And I hold the people that I worked with very dear. As my career has grown I have had the opportunity to work with many other people that have also had a profound effect on me. Finally, there is a vast amount of people in this industry that I have met along the journey. They are friends, mentors, counselors and confidants. And again, I am grateful.
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