‘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 […]
Letters from the Edge
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 […]
Mimi Casteel Revisited – Is Wine Big Enough, Organic Wine Podcast
My second interview on Organic Wine Podcast last December was a welcome opportunity to explore where I am going next on my Hope Well journey. Adam Huss never fails to ask the difficult and interesting questions. For instance, Is Wine Big Enough? Mimi Casteel Revisited – Is Wine Big Enough? December 6, 2021 Mimi Casteel started […]
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, […]
The Nitty Gritty on No-Till
Dear friends, I had the great pleasure recently of diving into a nitty-gritty conversation about no-till agriculture with Jesse Frost on his No-Till Market Garden Podcast. This is a podcast by real farmers for real farmers and Jesse knows how to ask interesting questions about how regenerative no-till farming actually works on real farms. […]
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 […]
Seeking an Optimum and Never a Maximum – Slow Wine Manifesto
Last October I was honored to be invited to join several winemakers from around the world who participated by video in the introduction of the Slow Wine Manifesto in Italy on October 11, 2020. My part was nice and short, but it gave me the opportunity to appreciate one of the brilliantly stated key principals […]