Questions I try to avoid

(This is part one of a question avoidance theme posting.)

Question 1: So... what is happening with the vineyard?

As many of you know, we leased a vineyard last season. (I say "we", but it was really Greg - I just got regular updates and helped out occasionally.) It was good and bad. It is a marginal vineyard, but Greg managed to produce a large amount of beautiful-quality fruit. Unfortunately, this year the wine market was just flooded with fruit.

Everyone and their second cousin has been putting in grapes on any spare half acre for the past 5 years and it all hit the market like some kind of grape tsunami this year. Bad luck for us. We were able to sell our Pinto Noir, but nothing else. The birds got a great feast.

We lost some money (though, surprisingly not that much - it was mostly Greg's time), but feel that we were able to test the market in an invaluable way. Any money that we lost this year was far less than if we would have gone into debt planting our own vineyard right away! So, because of this past year and where we see things for the next few years, we are putting off planting our own vines for a while... who knows for how long.

We're looking into cows at the moment. That should be an interesting experience in itself!