If you’ve been following us for any amount of time or have been to our tasting room, you’ll know we are truly a family winery. There are challenges to running a family business, especially with little kids. Casey and I (Hillary) have two wonderful kids Salem (our crazy 6 year old son) and Shiloh (our adventurous 4 year old daughter). We live on our property, work the vines, make the wine and run the tasting room. Our family life is very intermingled with our business life, and that includes our kids too. This is why, even during the busy summer season, we’ve chosen to not be open 7 days a week like most wineries. It’s hard enough to separate work and family life and if we were open 7 days a week, it would be near impossible!
As hard as it is to live and work from home, it’s also incredible. We get to have our kids with us all the time while we work and since we live on the property, if they need a break, they can hang out at the house play lego’s and just chill for awhile. Even if we’re working the very back of our property, the kids can literally call from their window and we hear them. When harvest comes we have them come out to the vineyard with us. Sometimes they help, sometimes they dig holes in the vineyard rows, and sometimes they eat all the grapes they pick! When we have other families come and help us pick, the younger kids running up and down vineyard rows while the older kids and grownups help with picking, fills my heart with joy. The long days of harvest are hard on our kids, but since we live on the property they still get to be with us and we still take the time for family dinners every evening, books read before bed and kisses good night, followed by Casey and I processing grapes until the work is done sometime after midnight. It’s exhausting, fulfilling, hard work and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Of course our kids complain about how much we have to work, but I don’t think they realize that if we didn’t have our own business we would be working almost as much and all our work would be away from them. Plus I know that as our business takes off, as we learn and grow in our vineyard management and winemaking practices, our workload will lessen. Our kids will grow up having learned what hard work is, an appreciation for the land, a since of pride in helping our family build something together, the skills to grow their own food, raise their own animals and who knows, maybe someday they will take over the family business.