Dear Friends, I realize that my personal fear of email overload provides a comfortable excuse for being terrible at communicating with those of you who have, in fact, volunteered to receive emails from me. But I like to think I’ve spared you from anything extraneous, waiting instead to share only what I hope you will […]
Mimi's Writings
Imaginarium
Dear Friends, Almost exactly a year ago, I was asked to speak at the incredible 2023 Napa Rise event in California, sponsored by Napa Green. If you don’t know Napa Green, it is one of the most thoughtful certification programs I have seen, providing concierge-level service to growers, wherever they are on their journey, while […]
A Drink from the Well of Improbable Hope
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 […]
Blush and the Bovine – A tale of two deaths and eternal life
As goes rosé, so goes beef. Rosé is dead, long live rosé Whilst summer fills our cups with sunshine, before her longest day grows dim, let us pass a moment together and let our thoughts be fluid, quenching the desiccated landscapes of our wrung-out minds. Put down spinning worries and numbing problems and let’s make […]
new Hope Well, and new wines!
HUNTER’S MOON October 9, 2022 Friends, First and foremost, we finally have some Pinot Noir to sell and I’m so excited to share these wines with you. As you know from my earlier letter about Vendange 2021, these are the last wines I made at my old site, and for that their stories carry special […]
Bated Breath – Vendange 2021
‘New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings’ ~Lao Tzu We ended how we started, by singing on the land. That vintage 2021 marked the beginning of yet another decade in this millennium was a truth I only appreciated in retrospect. That it was the last harvest for me at 12345 Oak Road (seriously, that […]
New Release 2021 wines from Hope Well
Hi there, Friends, It’s been a few turns. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. Everything has changed. What, in the pandemic, we may have mistaken for a temporary, though massive, perturbation in our lives, may have in fact been the changing of a deeper rhythm of our lives. But that is another post, and today it is […]
Silver Linings
Catalyst: an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action Most of you who follow Hope Well now know that 2020 was a catalyst. If you read Vendange 2020: the Hardest Lessons Yet, the events of 2020 were yet unfolding as I wrote that post, still eager to see what the harvest would yield, […]
No Time Left
Presented at the Acres USA Healthy Soils Summit August 26, 2021 Hi everyone, my name is Mimi, and my farm is in Oregon. I’m very honored to be a part of this day with you. I’d like to begin by sharing a story about where we are, as a way of beginning a conversation about […]
Hope Well Journey
There is no easy way to start a letter like this. For years you have been on this journey with me. We have traversed the hard-won successes and the setbacks of trying to reimagine agriculture at the family farm scale. When I left Bethel Heights, this farm, this place, was where I lived. It was […]
Outcasts
I have few more pungent olfactory memories than those from the late summers of my childhood. The grapes growing softer and sweeter, the smell of the grasses changing from green and sappy to spicy, sweet and dry, the crackling of insect noises in the fields and forests. But nothing could compare to the purple-black, heady […]
Vendange 2020: The Hardest Lessons Yet
Dear Friends, Outside of my field notes, I rarely write in the growing season or near the harvest. Keeping up with the work takes 110% physical and mental presence, but this year I have decided that some things should not be looked at in the rearview. I have wanted to maintain a spirit of both […]
Who’s Really Trampling out the Vintage?
Who’s Really Trampling out the Vintage?Una nota de gracias About a year back, when I was still working with my dear friends at Lingua Franca, I found myself navigating the darkest hour between their night harvest and my dawn harvest at Hope Well. Not enough time to go home and get a nap, too tired […]
An urgent conversation about the power of regenerative agriculture
Last month I had the honor of participating in this public seminar with three of my intellectual heroes, sponsored by my far-sighted and generous New York distributor, Polaner Selections. The entire seminar, including audience participation, was recorded and is here presented in its entirety. Please join us! – Mimi Casteel “Please join carbon farming ‘bioneers’ Mimi Casteel […]
An Earth Day Letter to my Friends, for my Friends
My Comrades and Kin, As we revel in the gifts of spring, watching the vineyards push first growth, I beg your attention for a moment of community around our shared love for this land, for this earth. Many of you pledged your name to an agreement we have named The Oak Accord. The nature of […]
New Year’s – Letters from the Edge
Juxtaposed with the exuberance of spring, and the languidly long, warm, caramel colored summer nights that barely dip a toe in darkness before light brushes the mountains, and the frenetic energy and furious productivity of the harvest, winter can appear a hard stop. Amongst the seasons it is the metaphor for death, impenetrable, a mosaic […]
Complexity is Stability
June, 2018. The vineyard is practically vibrating with the energy of spring. We are embarking on a very ambitious goal of adding 50 species to the existing cover on the vineyard floor. I hope to achieve a diversity of perennial and annual grass, flower and (even some vegetable) species to have close to 100 species […]
Invitation to join the Willamette Valley Oak Accord
Printer Friendly (PDF) Mimi Casteel, Invitation to join the Willamette Valley Oak Accord At the Annual Meeting of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, February 2017 Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about the movement we are now calling the Oak Accord. This movement sprung organically from conversations about the relationship between […]
On Stewardship
Printer Friendly (PDF) Mimi Casteel on Stewardship For the public announcement of the Willamette Valley Oak Accord, March, 2017 I spend a lot of time thinking about words and meaning. We underestimate the way our words, the rhetoric of our time, designs the present and the future, though we need only open a history book […]
Glyphosate, Chronic Use and Chronic Toxicity, a Global Pandemic and Matter of Immediate National Security
Printer Friendly (PDF) Glyphosate, Chronic Use and Chronic Toxicity, a Global Pandemic and Matter of Immediate National Security By Mimi Casteel, MS, Winegrower Hope Well Objectives: Present Glypohsate MOA, unique properties, and its basis for Chronic Toxicity Present current patterns of use and implications Present platform for awareness and change