Liquid Planet's general manager, Jerrod, shows off the Missoula downtown store's special Ten Spoon corner.
Missoula Library champion, commercial realtor and downtown celebrity Abe Abramson has a moment of affection with his bottle of Flathead Cherry Dry.
Lise and Al, delivering organic cherries from Flathead Lake
Ten Spoon's Frontenac grapes
Katie stirs crushed cherries in the fermenting tank.
Harvesting Dreams
«BACK TO THE BEGINNING In 1972 Andy Sponseller was eating lunch with his friend Tom Berger at the Champion International Paper Mill just west of Missoula. The two men sat in the lunch shack atop the #5 boiler hawing about their jobs and eating their bag lunches, dreaming. They were pipe fitters, workingmen, and Tom turned to Andy with a thought. Tom was Andy’s senior by a dozen or more years and a wine enthusiast., “an aficionado,” Andy calls him, a man who in their off-hours had been introducing Andy to the pleasure of fine wine. “We could grow grapes here,” is what Tom suggested to Andy that day, returning to what history will cal his bologna sandwich.
And does not say what his response was. More than likely he simply looked around. Missoula sits at 46 degrees 7 minutes north latitude. At 3,200 feet above sea level. The boondocks of viticulture, both horizontally and vertically. It could hardly be confused with the Napa Valley.
Thirty-three years later, a half-sheet of plywood spray-painted with HARVEST PARKING THIS WAY points me off tallesnake Drive only a few miles from where the two men once sat. Out beyond the sign, beyond the knapweed, beyond most people’s wildest dreams and hidden among four-and-a-half acres of vineyard, Andy stands surrounded by his dream, sampling its reality. It is the first day of harvest, the day of the year when dozens of neighbors, friends and volunteers stain their hands purple for the fun of it, for the camaraderie, friendship and community of it. Up and down the neatly planted rows the pickers move between clusters of grapes hanging in deep-space blues, sunstruck yellows, each grape an individual cell of flavor crowded shoulder to shoulder, orb to orb, a marble-sized sphere of Montana sunshine. The clusters hang pendulously, succulently, erotic in their lust for the tongue. Just 100 yards away lunch is spread out for the pickers. There is a keg, salads, bottles of wine, and hovering above it all, yellow as chardonnay, the Rattlesnake Creek Winery.
Andy and his wife Connie Poten hauled out their first rock and planted their first grapevine in 1998, toasting the echoes of Tom Bergers lunchtime idea. In 2000 they built the winery, outfitting the back half, its future warehouse, as their home. The 2005 harvest will be their third commercial harvest; 2,600 vines producing 10 tons of fruit that will create 650 cases of five different quality organic wines grown from grapes planted, pruned, picked, pressed and bottles in Montana. (For anyone who lives in the state it is worth saying it again, partly for the audacity of it, partly for the sheer pleasure.)
Standing on the winery’s flagstone patio Connie hands me a glass of their Fat Cat White, the only white wine made in Montana using 100 percent Montana-grown grapes. “It’s like Christmas,” she says, referring to the excitement of harvest, “Christmas like when you’re a little kid.” MORE»
