a note on the farmi ng

Landscape
W
e live on a small hillside farm in south-central
Vermont, a piece of land that has been home to us
for almost twenty years and has been the landscape for the
many cycles of lives that have touched ours: births and deaths,
weddings and funerals, love at rst sight and lifelong romances.
the farm sits up high, just below a green schist crest of the Green Moun-
tains, believed to be some of the oldest rocks on the Earth. The farm is about
1,600 feet above sea level, having eroded over the last four hundred million
years from mountains that once loomed 8,000 feet high, in a protected
and conserved forest and meadow area called the Chateauguay No Town.
Fifty thousand acres of relatively undeveloped land comprise the Chateau-
guay, and it has always been a rather remote and wild terrain. In the 1850s,
desperadoes hoping to get rich quick came to the Chateauguay as part of the
Bridgewater Gold Rush, but in the end no one came away with much gold.
One family wrote that they mined only enough to make a wedding band. The
land of the Chateauguay proved to be too unruly for easy riches.
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an unli kely vi neyard
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As far as I can tell, the name Chateauguay originated in France, from
a small community outside of Dieppe in Normandy. A friend recently
mentioned that he had heard the name was a Frenchied version of the
Indian Sha-taw-gay, but I have been unable to nd any other reference to
support this theory, either written or in the local oral history.
According to the French, in the 1600s a young Robert Lemoyne was
shipped to the new world of Nouvelle France at the age of twelve and was
sent to live with the Mohawks to learn their language and ways. When he
was of age, he was granted a parcel of land, which he named Chateauguay
after his fathers village. In Quebec there is a town named Chateauguay, and
a river. No one seems to know exactly why this name has been given to a
dense interior land in the Delectable Mountains, a small set of hills a little
more than 100 miles south in Vermont. And no one seems to know why there
is a village designation of No Town, except that now there literally is no town
here. Only wild bracken overtaking the remnants of cellar holes and the
occasional pottery shard dug up by a curious crow.
It is here in the midst of this Chateauguay landscape that surrounds our
home that the idea for this next journey reveals itself to me, the adventure
that is a book about to be written. The hope of the unfolding narrative begins
to come together like the quirky and varied layers of a shadow box: an assem-
bling of scraps of images, scents, tastes, stories, memories, and elements that
comprise the place we''ve begun to call our farm.
Many years ago, Caleb and I found ourselves living abroad in Italy, fall-
ing hard for a culture and her cuisine. Upon our return, we became smitten
with the notion of opening a small village restaurant, fed by what the local
hills and valleys could produce. That restaurant, which now exists, began
as a bakery and caf and has evolved over time into our little village tavern,
or osteria. This was the beginning. As time passed, we became taken with
another idea: that of growing our own gardens to provide for the osteria.
This written journey that is our farm involves the planting and tend-
ing of those vegetable gardens for the osteria, and the planting and eventual
harvesting of our vineyard and orchard; it concerns the making of wine and
the notion that life can be lived in both work and play, in a way that offers
an honest sustenance. Its about wine and about a natural agriculture that
encompasses the ideas of a complete farming landscape, philosophies like
permaculture or biodynamics, and forest-edge ecology. Its about naturalistic
wine, and what that really means. Its a story of the landscape cultivated for
the table.
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landscape
This part of our story is about learning and making mistakes, about
looking to those who inspire us. This story is a portraitin both broad
and ne strokesof our vineyard and the day-to-day workings of the farm
that denes the landscape and the harvest and wine it produces. The wine
being the alchemical liquid that pulls us outside of ourselves and teaches us
something new: to be winegrowers who work as closely with the land as our
human hands will allow, both in the eld and in the wine cellar.
Modern agriculture has an afnity for language; weve seen words like
green and sustainable go in and out of fashion and back again. We see farm-
ers searching for new ways to articulate how they might responsibly husband
the future by turning up the past. In wine, we use the old French word terroir
to discuss wines that somehow speak of a sense of place. And while this word
has begun to be used more widely and loosely to describe a kind of culture
and sensibility, and has begun to lose some of it fashionable luster, I believe it
can never go out of style or become irrelevant. There is no other way to sum
up the aggregate philosophy of the true farmer. Terroir is many-faceted. The
general assumption is that this word speaks only to the geology of the land in
which we grow wine, or fruits, owers, and vegetables, or livestock. But this
word encompasses more than merely schist and clay, sand and chalk. Terroir
is about mud and stones, but it is also about the varietal nature of the plants
or animals that grow in or on this land, the microclimate of a hillside or
plain, and the personality of those who do the tending. It represents the six
sides of the honeycomb: geology, variety, geography, climate, social culture,
and the human hand. Another winegrower I know says that what is poured
into the glass is a liquid landscape painting of the 365 days of a certain year.
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This is my hope on our farm: to capture the four seasons of each year in the
bottle, a liquid portrait of our landscape and its history. This is my quest.
Proserpina is the name of the Roman goddess of the seasons: She repre-
sented the springtime growth of crops, which led to the eventual harvest
of the autumn, and the whole cycle of life, death, and renewal. She was the
daughter of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, and of Jupiter, god of the sky and
weather. Her counterpart in Greek mythology is Persephone, who lived in
the underworld during the winter months and emerged aboveground, just
like the plants she renews, with the rst signs of spring.
When I began compiling this book, I was reading an old text on agri-
culture by Virgil, a text that is closely linked with the ancient agricultural
practices that form much of the basis of what is now known as biodynamic
farming. Proserpina is mentioned in the Georgics, as is her mother, Ceres.
Together they form a powerful duo that oversees the world of nature and the
human cultivation of the farm. Alongside Jupiter, who rules the skies, I see
them form a triumvirate of terroir. Proserpinas name is believed to come
from the Latinized version of Persephone, the word proserpere meaning to
emerge or creep forward. This is often associated with the growth of grain
because of her mother Ceress connection to grains, but Ive often thought
it would be more accurate to connect the denition with the grape vine.
In French, a grape vine is called a plante grimpante, a plant that climbs or
creeps upward. In Italian, they are considered rampicante, twining enthusi-
astically toward the sky. The kinship between the seasons of Proserpina and
the life of the vine, the life of a garden, or of a farm, appeals to me, and it
only makes sense that the mythological goddess of the growing season would
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landscape
preside alongside her mother and father over the cycles of the year. These
gods, as personications of nature, represent the real painters and storytell-
ers of that liquid landscape in our glasses.
Whenever I speak or write of our farm, the farm always asserts itself, as if
it were spelled in capital letters, because we never imagined that the terrain
weve come to call home would grow into a working and edible landscape.
I never imagined I would be a farmer, let alone a farmer with a quest. To
be fair, I never even imagined owning a restaurant, or growing wine. Ive
written elsewhere that at the center of this farm is an unlikely vineyard, a
geography so far north it seemed madness to try to grow wine. But Ive also
written elsewhere that I am an unlikely winegrower. Most of my stories start
with this notion, I never imagined . . . , or Twenty years ago, I would never
have guessed . . . I seem to repeat myself, but they are true lines, and I
make the most sense of deciphering how I spend my days by stepping away
either physically or metaphorically, and relaying the adventure with words
and images that I shape around each other.
Several years ago, we began to turn our 8 acres of land into a farm, return-
ing it to an earlier point in its history. Our parcel was once part of a much
larger subsistence farm, and by subsistence I mean the old-fashioned notion
of what we now call sustainable. The land was used as a dairy farm, with a
large cow barn (which has now been turned into a second home), rough stone
walls, open pasture, forested hills for logging, a farmhouse garden that grew
vegetables for eating during the season and putting up for the winter, plum
and apple trees, and naturally growing wild edibles in the elds and along
the streambed dissecting the land. That old farm fed the family that lived on
it plus the land created a living for them in the world outside the farm. But
once dairy farms began to slide into economic complications, and the old
farmer had gotten too old to work the land, the property became divided into
smaller parcels, and houses were built as single-family dwellings or summer
camps. Our house was constructed as a summer camp that sheltered the old
farmer and his wife, and the originally divided parcel became even smaller
over the years, pieces sold off to keep the old farmer healthy and his head
above water. It is an old story, a melancholy story, a true story.
By the time we came along, the house had changed hands once. The
meadow had been left to return to the wild, full of ferns, goldenrod, and
the march of young poplar. The once locally renowned wildower garden
of the lady farmer had been pulled up or gone to seed; only afterthoughts
were left of spring daffodils, a hedge of wild rose, and an exhausted aspara-
gus bed. A little shed remained, painted dark red with white trim, techni-
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landscape
cally a potting shed that had once been used to house two baby lambs for a
season, to protect them from the prowling coyote of the Chateauguay, that
wild forest above and around the old farm meadows.
When we arrived on the land, we did not know how to farm. We barely
knew how to garden. Our rst gardens were lessons in humility. Garden beds
were rampant with bolted chicories and threaded through with grass and
herbs, invasive things that spreada place for our cat to hide and catch mice.
We never properly prepared the soil; we didnt know how to tame the eld
that surrounded our gardens and wanted to overtake them. Those rst years
were misguided and sheer ghts against nature. And everyone knows the
outcome to that tale.
The next two garden spaces we built did improve with raised beds and
compost. Beds that we originally thought might have roses and ornamental
fruit trees soon were growing lettuces, carrots, onions, beans, herbs, beets,
celery, fennel, cabbages, radishes, and tomatoes. Before we knew it, we were
harvesting produce to take to our small osteria where we cooked and served
simple dishes and honest wines, and the small orchard we had planted began
bearing fruit for tarts, cakes, and sauces. By the time we planted the rst
vines and the rst walnut trees, we suspected that what we had on our hands
an unli kely vi neyard
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was a farm, but it took us a little while before we were brave enough to call
it by that name. We hemmed and hawed around the words gardens, vine-
yard, orchard. We were cook and sommelier, dishwashers and writers, oor
scrubbers and servers. By the time we had tucked in our rst wine and cider
harvest for the winter, and by the time we were pruning the apple trees in
two feet of snow, we realized we had to come clean. We had a vineyard. We
were growing wine. We owned a farm. A very small farm, but a producing
farm. And we had become farmers.
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landscape