An Autumnal Tale with a most Improbable End
Equinox Eve, Sept 22, 2023
Friends,
Once a year, just before the first rain beetle takes flight, as the angle of shifting light splits umbrellas of leaves in a syrupy prism of golden green into carmine, as the redolence of sappy summer dries to a heavy blaze of spice, as the acorns weigh anchor into leaf mulch, as the warmth on the face gets tingly around the edges, as the bending emerald hardens to snappy brown; this shifting heralds the return of Harvest Mimi. Not to be confused with Danger Mimi, Existential Crisis Mimi, Math Mode Mimi, Mix Master Mimi, Adventure Mimi, or any other Mimi, Harvest Mimi is hands down, everyone’s favorite Mimi. Whyever so, you ask? Well, clearly, we’ve not met then.
Moments before and moments after. Anticipation and hindsight. Imagined and realized. What lies between is the most perfect and pure expression of life. What lies between is the act. The doing and the making fill the space between what we hope for and what we regret or celebrate. In the work on the land, imagination is active and physical. To arrive at the doing and the making, for me, imagining is an imperfect promise, an expression of my devotion and love, and an offering without expectation. But in my experience, nature rewards reciprocity most generously.
I realized I left you hanging after last year’s pre-harvest post, wherein we still didn’t know if our tiny crop would cross the finish line. Now, here I am, putting on my Harvest Mimi pants, third edits in and 15 forecasts open, about to place hands on the fruits of 2023, and I have the delicious pleasure of picking you up in the paper boat and running back upstream to sail THE MOST IMPROBABLE STORY OF 2022.
Making Hope Well small allowed me to imagine what might happen when we do more with less. It also led to an incredible year of more imagining and doing: Landscape-level imagining of what might, what could and what WILL happen when we shine the Bat Sign to invite humans to act upon their love and devotion to the land that owns them. I will be sharing some of this in future, less infrequent (queue the cackling in the Peanut Gallery) posts in the hope that you take hope, are fed, find a place to plug yourself in.
In late October 2022, if your grapes haven’t fed the flocks of starlings and you just need, say, a few more weeks to get ripe, you may as well wish for a Pegacorn (Oh come ON, Pegasus + Unicorn = Pegacorn) to pick you up from school and fly you to a land made of candy where all your stuffies can talk. But that didn’t stop me from telling those grapes how awesome they were going to be and how we would make a fort, and stay up all night, and sing songs and play hide and seek in the dark for Halloween. I mean, I was trying to steel myself, to be realistic, and I guess for me being realistic involves a lot of rescheduling of my November commitments because it’s not IMPOSSIBLE to harvest grapes (for wine) on Thanksgiving.
But where blends the lighter and the darker halves of the year, Pegacorns take flight. As the last days of October blustered Novemberward, we found the dawn later, much colder, broodier, breezes whispering ‘tick tock, tick tock,’ and with sharp snips and light feet we found the fruit. The tiny postage stamp of Hope Well was graced with a season’s end that no bird, no rain, no calamity could find purchase in. And almost before the slow blood of slumber had warmed the tips of my fingers, it was done. We had three boxes. Two red, one white. Two Pinot, one Chenin. On their own, not enough to squeeze in the press or properly fill my fermenters.
Three thousand pounds. Forty-eight thousand ounces crossed the line and it only seemed fitting that the team that finished together should live on as one. So into the fermenter for a gentle tread with frozen feet, more songs and even more words of gratitude, and one fort built, as promised, to warm the champion of 2022, the Improbable Rosé Noir.
And now, we can share the beginning of the new Hope Well story with you, the friends who stayed for the credits, for the reels, even when the stage went dark. Well we’re back, with the call of the wild infusion we never expected but believed in nonetheless.
I’m not one to tell you what to drink with what, but this is a wine that will put a halo on the bounty of the coming season, especially the turkey. Taste it here.
Cheers!
~ Mimi