The Fizz #90: Shelby Perkins farms a vineyard the lava left behind

Winemaker and grape farmer Shelby Perkins and I dive into the geologic history of Eola-Amity Hills, her farming and fermenting practices, and the climate issues fueling her sustainability efforts.

For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Shelby Perkins, winemaker and grape farmer at Perkins Harter in Oregon’s Eola-Amity Hills AVA. This summer, I went out to visit her at her Bracken Vineyard to have a picnic lunch surrounded by grapevines and oak trees. Shelby is a magnetic person, brimming with passion and knowledge about everything from vineyards to geologic formations to climate patterns. To be in her company is to be whisked away into a world where everything is connected, everything is possible. I’m happy to have our subsequent abridged conversation transcribed here.

In this issue, we speak about how the Eola-Amity Hills AVA came to be, and specifically how Bracken Vineyard formed. We touch on Shelby’s farming practices—from keeping plastics out of the vineyard to her soil amendment methodology. We talk about her experiments in winemaking using her own honey and maple syrup tirage for sparkling wines. Overwhelmingly, the conversation circles around sustainability and climate change. Shelby’s transparency, curiosity, and connection to humanity outside of what happens on the crush pad is refreshing and inspiring. Her wines are no different.

Shelby Perkins of Perkins Harter

Margot: You have an epic professional history. You’ve got degrees in business, geology, environmental studies, you have two law degrees, you were a nuclear waste attorney. How does the work that you did then inform the work you do today?

Shelby: I’ve certainly had a number of different professions. In college I was a rafting guide and I liked the outdoors and intended to study art. I fell in with the crew that hung out in the geology department. We’d spend our weekends rock climbing and kayaking, hiking in the Adirondacks. The day after I graduated from college, I moved out to Bend, Oregon. I worked for a water testing laboratory with my minimal geology experience. I worked on geologic studies for the forest service in my spare time mapping soil horizons—paleontological digs, basically. Looking for fossils, looking for points made by tribes around Crater Lake.

Living in Bend was absolutely phenomenal, but I really didn’t have much direction, so I went back to law school and ended up at a government job, working on environmental models. Now I’ve been able to dovetail my interest in being in the outdoors with studying the science of the processes that I’ve seen in front of me, and I’ve been able to use that as a farmer, being in a place which has largely been guided by my ability to be present and observe what is happening. I’m immersing myself into that landscape, not only physically but intellectually.

Margot: What is the story of your place? Eola-Amity, Bracken Vineyard? What does terroir mean for that area? [Reader: get ready to dive into some heady topics]

Shelby: It all starts with plate tectonics. We’re on this ball of liquid metal flying through space and the earth is turning 2000 miles an hour and this planet is largely a cathode battery allowing us to have an atmosphere. The Earth’s magentosphere holds in this thin veil of gas that allows us to breathe and exist. This is the scientific view, right? We end up with this groovy space and time where our multicellular organisms have brought us to be, so then plate tectonics are a thing. As this ball of metal cools, the edges of it have cooled like a pudding skin. When you got that pudding skin and you run your finger along it, it leaves those lines, it’s kind of gooey. The Earth’s crust is effectively a semi-liquid, semi-solid pudding skin on a cooling mass of metal.

As it continues to churn as a cathode battery, it starts binding up and wrinkling the pudding skin. This has created a subduction zone in this area off the coast of the United States called the Juan de Fuca subduction zone. That has created a lot of pressure. It subducts underneath the North American continent and it has created, by aggregation, the basement rock of what is now Oregon. By shaving off little crusty bits from the ocean floor and continuously aggregating them on the North American continent, building it westward. It’s a process in geology known as accretion that built this area. The level of rock is called siliceous. That is the underpinning of the entire geological landscape in my area.

Now that said, that pressure continued and the force of that subducting plate, the Juan de Fuca, underneath the North American continent created buckling in the rocks. The coast range to my west is effectively the remnants of a large anticline or buckled rock layers that curved upwards. There’s also areas that are sink lines and buckled downwards. As they eroded, there were differential weights on the surface, the anticline of the coast range started to erode from the top, imagine like a baked loaf of bread.

It cracked at the top, like a baked loaf of bread gets that little fissure and then it started to erode downwards opening up the entire valley. That weight differential created fault lines because there’s different weights in the rock from the pressure offshore. So I live on a fault line that was created from differential rock weights. A fault block turned upwards. I live on basically a landslide that faces towards the west of volcanic rocks over sedimentary rocks, volcanics that spread across the landscape from a rift, that from all of that faulting, from all of the subduction zone offshore created fissures and resulted in lava flows flowing down into the Willamette Valley about 30 miles an hour at times. You can’t outrun that!

Humans weren’t around at that time, but I’m sure some critters got definitely mangled in that fast moving lava flow. That weight differential had a huge role to play in the site that I’m on, because there is lava flow above us, but there’s not below. Then there’s one chunk that probably fell off and ended up backfilling and creating a saddle. You’ve been out to my property, so you know where the oak grove is. The oak grove is basically a chunk of lava that fell off of that lava flow and then backfilled along that fault line. Effectively what you’ve ended up with is a landslide area that stretches a couple of miles north and south and about a half mile east and west. I’ve come to call it, and the local US geological survey representative agrees, a bench, it’s a benchland that is resulted from landslide material, and in this case we call it the Eola Bench.

So the subsection of the Eola-Amity Hills AVA that I live in is this Eola Bench and specifically Bracken Vineyard, named for all of the bracken ferns that grow there. That was like the beginning of time into today. I think I got it right.

Margot: That was incredible. The deep dive I have ahead of me is going to be epic. What does all that mean for the plants that are growing in that area? You have these volcanic soils over the sedimentary soils, what does that translate to?

Shelby: First of all, when we talk about wine, it is always an issue of soil structure. How much water holding capacity is there in a vineyard, how much water availability is there for the plants? Secondarily, looking at the chemistry primarily, it’s a highly acidic soil. That affects the nutrient uptake of plants. Certainly when there’s a lot of acidity in the soil some nutrients become deficient and unavailable to the plant. Let’s say if we treat vineyard soil with lime in our area where we have these really acidic soils and bring the pH up, there’s more nutrient availability for the plant. It’s able to uptake it more readily. That’s the chemistry side.

On that water holding capacity side, I described that I have an area where a rock has fallen off, a chunk of lava has fallen off, and the soils are very shallow there. So I don’t have much water holding capacity, but the other areas where I have deeper soil, there is more. When it comes to volcanics, these volcanic materials are very clay heavy. So once we have a fairly full water table or the soils become so permeated with moisture, they really have some water holding capacity in the deeper soils that help sustain the plant throughout the growing season and allow for dry farming, which is a goal as a matter of sustainability.

And, wine quality, of course. Showing the vintage for what it is without an influx of irrigation water that we’d rather keep in the ground rather than have evaporate off of the plants if they can sustain themselves.

Margot: I know that you farm organically. Do you find yourself having to amend the soils at all because the soil is so acidic and how do you do that?

Shelby: We use lime and we’ve mixed it with organic manure. Obviously I’m also practicing some biodynamics preparations. I think that it’s hard to say one is biodynamic if you don’t have animals on site—they really close the loop. But I do practice some biodynamics and also make some teas for my soils. I brought in seaweed from the coast and made teas to run through irrigation lines when we had baby vines to give them nutrients.

Rather than having a tractor in that instance running through the vineyard delivering something for sustenance without compaction or fuels sometimes makes a lot of sense. I’m not gonna say never—never say never on irrigation. Getting baby vines established without water can be very difficult. Now that said, new amendments become important and then going back and understanding what is really happening with the plants is critical. We had a discussion this past spring with some of my vineyard team—I have some folks that help me out with farming because I am 52 years old and I have 16 acres of grapevine, so it’s not a one person job.

One of my viticulture guys was saying hey, let’s amend the soils. I’m like do we know what the chemistry of the soils are right now? Do we know what the chemistry of the plants is? I argue let’s not add something unless we know what it is that we should be adding rather than blindly just adding nutrients to soil and creating problems of imbalance. Furthermore, can we look at different areas of the vineyard and determine whether there’s some areas that are deficient? I want to mitigate any chance of overdoing it and rather bring everything into a balance than be ham handed about our farming.

Margot: How often do you do soil testing now?

Shelby: I would say every two to three years. If there’s a vibe in the vineyard and you kinda know when things are feeling a bit off, or the plants are looking at you trying to tell you that they need a little something. There’s a lot we can do with foliar sprays in terms of getting through the season. We see that we need to fine tune during the growing year.

Margot: That makes sense. You established or took over, help me understand, Bracken in 2018?

Shelby: Yeah, it wasn’t really called Bracken yet. There was a gentleman who had purchased the place and installed ten and a half acres of grape vines and then sold me the vineyard a year and a half later, just planted. I came in to Bracken in the fall. August 31st, 2018. We started picking grapes on September 7th. My friends Jess Miller and Junichi Fujita and I all shared the fruit that year for our various projects. It wasn’t a lot when we got out there and we just picked it and got it done.

Margot: What is different about the vineyard now from when you first took over, what have you learned in that process?

Shelby: Yeah, it’s like a dual question. It’s what’s different about the vineyard and what’s different about you? There’s so much about that vineyard that’s my identity. I came in with ideas and I made some mistakes and it taught me some lessons. And I’ve made some changes to the vineyard too for its own health. It’s a dance between a human leading a vineyard and the vineyard leading ultimately.

I initially thought that I would not till—I would go immediately into no irrigation. Things got too dry. In the shallow areas I’ve had to amend the soils, add in more water holding capacity through composting. In the case of not tilling, I had a vole infestation that was completely out of control in 2020 and decimated a large proportion of my grapevines, maybe about 30% of them and it was a very expensive replanting. Furthermore, I doubled down on crazy and expanded the vineyard another five acres because I wanted more of that pain. But I think that’s what it takes. It was an opportunity in disguise because when I came into the vineyard, there were decisions made that I would’ve not made.

First and foremost, Riparia Gloire rootstock runs quite shallow and it’s well suited for vineyards that irrigate. It’s very responsive to irrigation, but it’s network runs shallow. We replaced it with 3309 and some other rootstock material that is better for dry farming and has a tendency to have a structure to seek water more deeply. Then of course, going right into organic farming and using mechanization to clean under vine because it hadn’t been done in the first couple of years. We ended up pulling vines that had J roots or weren’t planted very well. Either through the cultivator grabbing them because of the shallow root system, or just terrible planting.

It comes down to site preparation. When a vineyard is installed, you have one chance to get it right. So there’s things that should have probably been done in the shallower areas in terms of soil preparation. That is to say, I’m not an advocate for totally tearing up ground and really ripping it, but there’s some areas there where I don’t think a vineyard should have been planted because of the soil depth, but if they chose to do it, they should have maybe prepped it better and ensured that the rock had been broken and fractured up a little bit more, so the vines had more chance for success. I’ve been struggling to farm in those shallow areas.

Margot: What are you going to do about that? Are you going to continue struggling, or try to replant?

Shelby: Some vines I have taken out, and some I go out and hand water them and preen them and I spend a lot of time with them. There’s some areas where I’ve just stopped replanting because the rock comes right up to the surface and I can’t get the vine in the ground. So the question is, do we pull out a jackhammer and put in a vine or do I just skip it and let it be, like maybe the vine doesn’t need to actually be there?Not every vine needed to be in every slot in a particular grid. The point where you’re like, wow, we’re just being insane right here, right now. Just skip over this one, give this area a break already. Maybe the next vine would really appreciate it if you gave it a little bit more space.

Margot: I want to talk about climate. Your region is going through frost threats, fires. Are you thinking about the future of farming in your area? Are you taking any mitigation steps?

Shelby: I always think about climate. It’s in my subconscious. I was trained to think about it. I think about geologic time. Think about the Gaia Principle—how long are we going to be here with it? Is the Earth going to snap back with us or without us? Does it care? No. That’s always a founding cardinal point for me when I start thinking about climate.

I represented a three and a half billion dollar climate model for the government as a lawyer. Then I went on to be a fellow at National Academy of Sciences and looked at climate geoengineering, which I think is absolutely frightening and ethically bankrupt. Unless there is some we-need-to-save-humanity-at-the-very-last-second need for it. But the universe is dynamic and change is inevitable, and being responsive to change is the job of a farmer. Being present and mindful and responsive to ongoing change is a walking meditation. Farming is essentially a walking meditation in being present and observant to change.

We don’t really know what it’s going to be, so it’s hard to prepare for it. Warming trends can become cooling trends and cooling trends can be warming trends. There is a great value, I think, in considering as many possibilities of risk at any given moment as one humanly can. One could respond accordingly and pivot at a moment’s notice when needed.

All we can do is our best. There is no perfection. Responding to climate change has so many dimensions that are not only practical, but they’re societal and cultural and ethical. I don’t know how sustainable farming for grapes is in the very long term, but it is a lightning rod for awareness for a certain segment of society, which I think is wonderfully useful to telling the story of the predicament we find ourselves in.

Shelby’s dog, Tater, at Bracken Vineyard

Margot: Do you find yourself telling that story through your wine at all?

Shelby: I inherently do, by choosing the place where I’m farming. I’ve chosen a place with wind near the coast. Not further inland where things are warm, but where the Van Duzer Corridor winds come in to the Willamette Valley and keep the wines cool. That helps maintain a freshness and an acidity. So rather than utilizing their acids and wearing down their acids and having high alcohols, we have restraint. I have a goal of not adding any kind of acidity or sugar to my wines for any reason. As such, choosing site is important. So by virtue of the site I’ve chosen, it is inherent in that story.

In 2020, we also had forest fires in Oregon, a million acres burning. Unfortunately, I think in that vintage, when wines were produced, the story of climate change is in the glass. The evidence is there that by virtue of a drying hotter climate where average median temperatures are going up, or average lows are going up, and how we’ve failed to manage our lands or protected them from fires in the past, we’re creating this fuel for smoke taint risk to inundate the economic viability of wine growing in Oregon. You see it in Chile. You see it in Spain. You’ve seen it in France. It’s not unique. It’s all over the world.

In 2020 I didn’t make my Perkins Harter wines. I declassified and only made Spaghetti Western wines. The reason why I declassified them was because I used products like charcoal and bentonite and enzymes to break apart the cellulose material and pull and bind as much of that smoke taint as I could to the bottom of the tank and rack off of it. Then effectively I made $25 biodynamically farmed sparkling wines that were carbonated to get it out into the market as fast as possible and be consumed. It was the highest best use that I could create from the grapes that I grew. It was heartbreaking to do because that may have been a win in its own way, but it was never anything that I set out to do, and it’s nothing that I’d really want to do.

Every year since then, when August rolls around, I just find myself panicking across the finish line about smoke and about fire and fire safety. I have a hillside that’s forested and when we have red flag days, I pack a bag. Unfortunately, like a lot of people in this country and a lot of people in this world, I have to have a go bag if I have to leave the place that I live, the place that I farm, if there is a fire.

There’s something about climate change that’s really unsettling in a matter of societal commentary. Fires create diaspora. I can get in a car and leave. What happens if you don’t have the means to move? High magnitude, low probability events that are increasing in probability create a scenario where you can’t afford to get to safety or you don’t have the resources to get to safety because you don’t have a car. Because you can’t walk. Because you can’t run. Who are we leaving behind by not addressing climate change? As a society, we really need to have a “come to Jesus moment”, if you will, about how we’re going to care for humans when we need to shift our populations from place to place. Hiding from the risk of climate change puts us in peril.

You’ve probably seen the articles where the University of New Mexico Medical was doing research on brains and how much plastic was in the human brain, and they saw that it was enough as as much as a plastic spoon in your brain. We’re changing ourselves and we don’t know what the consequences are. This is why I am generally known to be absolutely obsessive about keeping plastic out of my vineyard. People always laugh at me about it, but I’m like, how are you ever gonna get it out?

Margot: On the topic of plastic, help me understand how vineyards use plastic and what you’re doing differently.

Shelby: There are things that are ubiquitous, like end row tags. Vineyard tie tape or marker material. When a vine is trained when it’s young, there is a green tape that’s often used, either stapled on or tied on, and the stapled on version pops off when the plant gets large enough or there’s too much tension, which is good for the plant, but it finds its way into the soil.

When I took it over, it had been established that way. We preened the vineyard and pulled out bags and bags and bags of little plastic ties and then we would till and I’d find more and more and more. For flagging too, when we use plastic flagging, I tell the crews you can use flagging when we need to, but we need to go get it when we’re done. It’s hard to find something better. I’ve experimented with fabrics, linens, prayer flags. I’ve gone through all kinds of materials that I thought would hold up. More recently my friend Junichi Fujita found a staple-on tape that’s made of paper from Japan. I’ve experimented with that this year and I’ve had good luck with it.

Line clips hold up and train the shoots of the vine between training wires and vertical shoot positioning or VSP trellising. A lot of people use plastic clips and they can break and get into the soil. I use wood that I get from France and it is pressed together with a pine sap binder, and I would rather have that in my soil than a plastic clip that falls off. I think it’s disgusting. There are plenty of organic vineyards out there, and you look around them and yeah, it might be organic, but look at all the garbage or the plastic floating around. It boggles my mind that a vineyard can be regarded as organic and yet just be rife with plastics.

Margot: Do you test for PFAS in your vineyard?

Shelby: I have not yet. I don’t know if I want to know. I don’t know if that will become a noise that will distract me from continuing to do the work that I would already be doing to keep everything out. I want to stay committed to that place. I don’t know if I want to lose heart, but that’s a really fair question. I think it’s a really deep question. I don’t think we can look away from the ugly, so yeah, maybe I should do it and rip the bandaid off and know what it is.

Margot: In Maine where I live, we’re at the forefront right now of PFAS testing because sadly we have huge PFAS issues. The state, in partnership with our nonprofits and environmental organizations, is trying to understand what we can do for PFAS cleanup, but information is sparse. It just becomes a mode of depression for us who begin to obsess over it.

Shelby: Exactly. The first day of my toxics law class, it must have been 1997, I can remember the professor saying whatever you do, don’t heat up food in a microwave. Don’t eat out of hot plastic ever. Now, it’s ubiquitous.

Margot: I want to touch on your sparkling wine methodology.

Shelby: Yeah, it’s funny, I’ve moved more towards sparkling this year. I never learned to make sparkling wine in any proper sense when I was in Napa and Sonoma before coming up to Oregon. When I took over the vineyard, I had that shallow area where the grapevines get tired very early compared to the other vines because they don’t have water holding capacity. The vines are anxious to push that fruit right off of them. The birds see that ripening fruit earliest because it’s right by some trees. Making sparkling is a way for me to get that fruit out of there and reduce the bird pressure on the entire vineyard at large.

The first sparkling I made, really was a shot in the dark. I think I had a handout from Rack and Riddle from 15 or 18 years ago from a presentation they were giving down in Healdsburg that I just happened into. I couldn’t figure out the corking, so I just put it under cap. I’ve continued mostly with the brut nature style, but really small batches. I tend to make one barrel or two barrels of sparkling wine per pick and focus on them pretty relentlessly as a means to experiment with the bounds of what my vineyard can do in the sparkling context.

I haven’t been consistent about what I do. I’ve made about, oh man, I’m probably getting close to 20 sparkling wines bottlings with this pick that just came in. Every one has an opportunity to learn about methodology, to step in all of the potholes and make all of the mistakes. I’m teaching myself how I want to interact with my base wines and bring them into a sparkling territory now.

I’ve used honey from my beehives. I’m pretty sure I told you the story about adopting a beehive off of Craigslist and getting it home and realizing the guy had he sold me Africanized bees. So instead of allowing them to exist in my environment, I killed them off. When it got cold enough, I flipped off the lid and froze them and took their honey. I used it for triage in my 2020 sparkling, which was lovely. It was told to me that about 70% of honey is fermentable sugar. Africanized bees make more honey, but it turns out there’s less sugar in it, so the conversion rate on that honey was about 60% I believe.

I’ve also experimented with Oregon maple syrup for tirage which initially was absolutely garbage and terrible, but I recently opened a bottle for someone that happened along and I thought it was one of the honey bottles. We turned it around and realized it was the maple syrup, and it actually turned around and integrated quite interestingly, quite beautifully. Maple syrup has thiamine in it, so it’s actually a form of food for the yeast and a secondary fermentation, not just a sugar. It creates a flavor.

I’m really interested in using sugars that I grow versus getting a product via France from the Caribbean produced in a completely different climate under different social conditions.

Margot: My last question for you is an existential one. Why are you doing this?

Shelby: That’s a really good question. I have wondered that at times. I love to create, I love to be outdoors. I love the expression. It keeps me from becoming bored. There’s something really gooey about wine. There’s so many ways to take it. There’s so many modes of expression. Doesn’t make any financial sense. It’s tough on the body. It’s emotionally agonizing at times. Failures are tough to take. But wine is giving. Making wine gives people joy. When I made my first wines and I recognized how happy it made people or gave them joy in their homes or brought something extra to their family celebrations, wow.

You could certainly say that winemakers are narcissists, they are capturing their id in the bottle itself. They feel like they can do better or have something to say. Artists are narcissists. There’s a narcissistic dream in a bottle of wine. But it’s not totally self important. There is an altruism to giving oneself. It’s an offering. The artist’s dream is an offering. It’s a communication of place. It’s a story, and hopefully if anything else, it’s just an energetic transfer to humans to uplift them. So much of what’s happening in this planet right now is people tearing each other apart. Can we build something with agriculture? Can we weave an agriculture together and build things?

I feel really strongly about trying to stand some ground, whether it’s at that vineyard or another vineyard, or one project or another, to build a culture for humanity in the face of so many that just seek to race to the bottom and tear everything down for their self-interest. Eventually, I believe that no matter how hard people try to tear things down, we have an inherent need to build and rebuild and rebuild and rebuild. All is not lost. Making wine is a defiant activity in the face of those who seek to destroy.

Margot: That is a motto for a whole group of growers and makers. Thank you Shelby for your time.

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Try the expressive and captivating wines from Perkins Harter by ordering from their website. The wines are distributed widely—ask for them in your local wine shop. Follow Perkins Harter on Instagram to get the latest on their releases and Shelby’s events. Enjoy, savor, share these wines. You’ll be glad you got ahold of them.

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