The beauty of it was I rarely failed to earn the 10 cent admission price to the Saturday matinee.  Then fate intervened. A stranger appeared one morning and requested a purple cabbage. I'd seen them of course. The Japanese fields behind our house were a profusion of purple cabbages and celery. But to tell the truth I never actually knew anyone who claimed to have eaten one. They looked disgustedly like eggplants.  Be that as it may, I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.  I told him to return in the afternoon and I would have his cabbage.  He agreed and I hastily put up the closed sign and made a dash for the feed room where I grabbed a gunny sack and headed for the back fence. There, I peered through a knothole to see if the coast was clear.  It was and I scrambled over the fence, darted through a patch of celery, and arrived in the midst of the cabbage wild-eyed and winded.  It was at that moment I made my second mistake. It had to be a blue ribbon cabbage.  So there I was picking and choosing like a kid in a candy store all the while a swarthy little man on a bicycle was closing the distance between us.  And the first inclination I had that something was awry was when I was engulfed by a dark shadow.  Quite naturally this triggered a leap that came within inches of Jesse Owen's world record and my legs began to churn furiously upon impact. Glancing back I saw a man running in the opposite direction, away from me.  Puzzled, I stopped to make sense of it and in an instant it became clear.  He intended to cut off my escape on his bicycle.  Successfully, I regret to say.  I couldn't believe it; the man was quick as a cat on that bike.  No matter which way I ran he arrived at my destination before me, using a perimeter road to thwart my efforts. This went on for an hour before I fell into a heap, exhausted

I can't remember much of what transpired other than being shaken like a rag doll and being told that if I had wanted anything from his fields I should have come to his house and asked him.  Whipped and utterly defeated I slowly trudged home dragging an empty sack, pondering what I was going to tell my customer.  The next morning shortly after day break I appeared at the farmer's doorstep, gunny sack in hand.  He took one incredulous look at me and began screaming like a banshee.  Despite the language barrier I cleverly deduced that he looked unfavorably on my presence.  Thus it came to pass a few months later that I was only one of a handful of citizens who wasn't shocked and stunned by December 7th. After all, anyone capable of fibbing to a little boy was capable of anything.

After such an inauspicious start it may occur to some of you to wonder why I now find myself growing wine grapes, a crop that is coveted by thirteen mammals, eighteen birds, fourteen pathogens and sixty-seven insects.  The answer is quite simple really: age doesn't necessarily bring wisdom.

Our harvest and crush was unique in several aspects this year.  The forest fires which consumed over 200,000 acres in Trinity County alone produced a dense smoke that blanketed the area like a thick London fog.  The grapes from Hayfork, Hyampom and Junction City all had to be rejected because of smoke contamination.  Fortunately the smoke here was more like an uninvited ghostly guest who arrived at dinner time and left before the dishes were cleared.  The smoke was substantial enough, however, that we were faced with the prospect of either a very late harvest or the possibility of no harvest at all.  Thankfully we had a long mild fall which allowed us to complete the harvest without mishap.  At least from the standpoint of weather.  Personnel was another matter.  Two days into the crush I broke my right hip and Keith had a hernia operation.  I am reluctant to admit that the crush went as smooth as silk without me, but Keith was back on the job two days after surgery.  It is somewhat revealing, nonetheless, that for the remainder of the harvest he was known to the crew as "grumpy."

Commerce at the winery last summer was, to put it delicately, dreadful.  Between high gasoline prices, low lake level, smoke you could cut with a dull knife and the traffic control on the new road to East Fork we had slightly less business than a Fallujah haberdashery on a holy day.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that we opened up twenty-four new wholesale account in the Bay Area, the province and sanctum of Napa.  But you know what that means don't you?  It means if you want a "reasonably" priced bottle of Alpen Cellars you're still going to have to trek to Trinity County.

By the way I wasn't grumpy, GRUMPY who called me GRUMPY heads are going to roll.

P.S. Since writing this dad has been very sick, he's spent 2 months in the hospital with pneumonia, but the good news is he's slowly recovering.

Keith Groves & Mark Groves