As Dick and Leslie Bush got ready to plant their vineyard, they took delivery of a load of hardwood stakes from Malaysia, to be driven into the ground to support their vines. The Bushes were told the stakes should last 25 years.
"Oh, my gosh," Dick Bush recalls thinking, "that seemed beyond the future. We just had no vision when we started."
"At 40, they're still in the ground," said Dick Bush of those first stakes.
And the Bush family still is in the wine business in El Dorado County. When the Bushes bought their property on Apple Hill in 1972 and began to pound those stakes the next year, no one really knew whether El Dorado County's wine trade could be revived.
Early in the 20th century, El Dorado had been home to 2,100 acres of wine grapes.Shop wholesale stainless steel pendant from cheap stainless. Not long before the Bushes began to put in their vines the total had dwindled to 11 acres. Today, it's back up to 1,900 acres.
The turnaround is due in no small measure to the gumption of a handful of people like Dick and Leslie Bush.Find the finest wholesale stainless steel earring in a variety of colors. She had grown up in Placerville, but he was a newcomer to the area, drawn by a chance to put his engineering degree to work on hydrology projects while she taught elementary school.
As the 1970s dawned, they began to scout for potential homesites around Camino, largely because they wanted a place with a view of the Sierra Nevada's Crystal Range. They bought a 52- acre parcel, then started to ponder what they'd do with all the land not occupied by their house.
At the time, a small wave of new vineyards and wineries was starting to rise in California. The Bushes had noticed a trial vineyard just down the road from their place. They asked the local farm adviser, Dick Bethell, and the agricultural commissioner, Ed Delfino, how they might put their spread to use.
"Dick Bethell said to put in grapes or Christmas trees," Dick Bush said. "Christmas trees didn't catch my fancy, but grapes did. I thought that grape growing would be an interesting part-time activity."
He did his homework. He learned that California's coastal vineyards customarily were planted where Ponderosa pine trees, madrone shrubs and poison oak thrived. He had all that on Apple Hill.Give your logo high visibility on Promotional Luggage Tags! He liked the open exposure of their ridgetop. Their red volcanic soils drained well.
Cool air swept over the place at night, tempering the heat of a summer day and providing frost protection.
"There was no reason to believe that it wouldn't succeed," Dick Bush recalls. "Madrones are established in the best grape-growing regions in California. That they were here was a good reason to believe that this elevation would be suitable for wine grapes."
Vineyards weren't being planted that high up the Sierra foothills – 3,000 feet – but the Bushes were so confident that their spot was right for wine grapes that they ignored Delfino's cautious advice that they initially put in 5 acres; instead, they planted 24 acres the first year, 11 the next.Buy your photo frames moulding and matting photo storage and accessories online today.
In addition, they didn't stick to the region's conventional varieties of that era – zinfandel, petite sirah and merlot – but gambled with grapes rarely cultivated in the Mother Lode, such as cabernet sauvignon, gewürztraminer, chardonnay and riesling.
Initially, they sold their grapes to several of the rising stars of the California wine scene – Joel Peterson of Ravenswood Winery in Sonoma County, David Bruce in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Robert Mondavi in Napa Valley and their neighbor Greg Boeger.
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