It Only takes One
Note: This blog is presented last post first. To read from the beginning, scroll to the post titled “Everything Will Turn Out OK.”
Back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton ran for president against Donald Trump, we let our daughter color in the dot next to Clinton’s name where it said “Select one candidate for president,” and took pictures of her outside the school where we’d voted, telling her she’d just helped to make history by voting for the first female candidate for president. Of course the next day when we woke up, the world was a very different place, but at that very moment, we could not have been more proud, more filled with hope about the future. I still believe in the power of one vote, especially considering how close things were in 2020, and I don’t intend this to be a political speech. I just want to point out that everything we do has meaning. Every effort has value.
This is a picture of the tasting room just before closing, when the only lights we leave on are the grow lights for the plants. From the street, it might almost appear that we’re up to something nefarious in here, but more often than not people thank us for making them feel safer when they walk by at night, as it’s the only light shining on this part of what can be a scary, deserted block. On December 28, we will turn those lights on for one last time. We’d hoped to be the store that changed the neighborhood and brought business to a corner people don’t tend to walk by, but that’s just not possible to do in a pandemic, especially the kind of pandemic in which one person who doesn’t even know they’re sick can sicken a dozen people and those dozen can in turn sicken…how many? In the third grade math we were doing with our daughter last year, we never got to the concept of exponents, which probably don’t come into play until your brain is mature enough to grasp the concept of infinity. Here at the tasting room, we kept our heads down and focused on more simple math. One sale at a time. One person at a time. A friend told us recently, “You’ve been swimming upstream this whole time.” We have, but not alone.
If I were to list the many acts of kindness, the people who have devoted their time and knowledge to helping us, the list would be too long. I started this blog at a rough time, over a year after our opening, and the handful of you who’ve been reading along have surely seen the end coming. But I don’t want to say goodbye without acknowledging the differences that a single person can make—that one person who helps to build the bar or leaves an outrageously large tip or redesigns our chalkboard or becomes our unpaid event planner or performs with her band for free to draw in a crowd. So, so many people have made a difference, one act at a time. But it has come to the point when some days, only one customer walks through the door, and that’s the kind of math that we can’t do. That’s the kind of math that means it’s time to say goodbye, and i’ll do so, as my Dad points out, without ever telling you a single thing about the wine that Josh put his heart into or the vines he took care of or the varietal blending we did in our kitchen or the sales calls our daughter trudged along on after school. This place is just four walls—albeit four painstakingly painted and cared for walls—but in the end, it’s just a building; and the drink, whether made from grapes or grain, is just the drink. A place like this is always bout the people.
It’s been an honor knowing you.
