Meet the winemakers

The idea comes from Maine. Edward “Sandy” Ives, the folklorist I studied under at the University of Maine, spent his career recording woodsmen, river drivers, and the men who worked the lumber camps. He asked each of them the same questions so their answers could be laid side by side, and those recordings became the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History. A way of working that nobody had thought to write down survives because he sat people in front of a tape recorder while they could still tell it.

Wine has plenty of tasting notes and winery profiles. What tends to go unrecorded is the work itself: who taught a winemaker, what they got wrong the first year, the names they gave the tanks, the harvest that nearly broke them. That knowledge lives in people’s heads, and it leaves with them when they retire.

So every winemaker in this series gets the same twenty questions in the same order, and their full answers run here as a transcript with a short summary from me at the top.

“You’re kind of my hero. Because of what you’re doing, guys like me get to do more of what we love to do.”

Greg La Follette, Marchelle Wines

The twenty questions are my own, and nobody gets a softer set or a harder one. The first ten are about the person: where the work was learned, who taught it, what got carried forward and what got left behind. The second ten are about the craft, including the words used in the cellar that never make it out to the tasting room. All twenty go out the day before, so nobody comes to it cold.