Memoir details journey to harvest

Sometimes it’s the unspoken word that calls out the loudest.

Ask George MacLeod how he traded a successful career in the Silicon Valley for farming rocky terrain in Kenwood, and he’ll credit the voices heard by his wife when they first visited the ramshackle 50-acre ranch they have since transformed into a premium vineyard.

That was 40 years ago, and it was the start of a journey filled with blisters, headaches and surprising joys.

MacLeod, 93, chronicles their experiences in his new self-published memoir, “Journey to Harvest: How to Grow Great Grapes, Make Distinctive Wines and Live Forever.”

It took little time for the Stanford University-educated couple to recognize Greta MacLeod was responding to the terroir, the natural environment where grapes are grown.

“I’m not exaggerating: There was an ambience right at the beginning,” George MacLeod said. “We were so psyched up finding this place.”

Brush along the driveway was so overgrown that the abandoned hillside ranch was accessible only through a neighboring property. Yet somehow, the land spoke to the couple.

“We really are holding hands with ghosts,” MacLeod said.

He credits generations of people before him - Native Americans, homesteaders, quarrymen who worked the rocky terrain - noting that each had a valuable connection to the land.

“You think the ranch just forgets about it? It’s part of the terroir,” said MacLeod, tall, lean, sure-footed and free of the wrinkles expected of someone his age.

Today, 30 acres at his beloved Indian Springs Ranch are planted with 18,000 grapevines, primarily sauvignon blanc, zinfandel and merlot. MacLeod Family Vineyard produces 1,500 cases annually, including the 2013 sauvignon blanc that took a gold medal in Sunset magazine’s International Wine Competition in May.

Other hand-picked grapes are sold to area wineries including Cline Cellars, Envolve and ?Kendall-Jackson.

Each and every vine has meaning to MacLeod, a pioneer in LED technology who knew little about growing grapes when he purchased his ranch in 1974. He kept his Silicon Valley job for five years and devoted time to clearing the land and educating himself about every step of viticulture.

He took classes, conducted research, planted an experimental vineyard at his Los Altos home and “interviewed all kinds of people” in the wine industry.

When the family moved to the ranch full time, “I wasn’t an expert, but I was familiar,” he said.

MacLeod started writing about his experiences on the ranch in 2000, penning monthly columns for the Kenwood Press community newspaper. His son-in-law Ed Murphy edited each draft, tightening the “very verbose” tales about the distinct seasons and responsibilities within the vineyard.

Full of wit and wisdom, the columns provide an insider’s view of the romanticized work of the wine country. Book editor Suzie Rodriguez compiled a month-by-month narrative taking bits and pieces of the best of MacLeod’s 120 published columns.

Each month features an interlude with personal essays and anecdotes. One highlights a visit with neighboring vintner (the late) Bob Kunde, each with a bourbon in hand, as the no-nonsense Kunde cautioned MacLeod to “make sure those grapevines are happy.”

The less-experienced MacLeod was perplexed.

“God damn it, George. The vines will tell you if they’re happy,” MacLeod recalled Kunde telling him.

He came to recognize Kunde was right.

“Those vines really do speak to you. It only took me 35 years to understand,” MacLeod said.

While the memoir is full of light moments, it does not overlook the hard work and constant faith along the journey. From disking the rocky loam to planting, grafting, trellising and training the vines to pruning and picking grapes, each step to harvest requires “infinite work,” MacLeod said.

He credits his success to his crew, his faith and his family. He and his wife have four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Many family members are involved in the business.

MacLeod grew up in poverty in the Great Depression, his father leaving the family when MacLeod was 7. He maintains deep gratitude for the many people who helped his family and shares vivid memories of summers on his grandparents’ farm.

He describes problems as “opportunities,” though some he could do without. “The most important word we have in the English language is ‘optimism,’?” he said.

MacLeod relied on that optimism during his early years on the ranch, when it took three seasons and a large crew to remove rocks, some boulder size, from the hillsides. Even after the winter rains, he could barely get a shovel into the dense ground.

He was in his late 50s then, with a torn rotator cuff from lifting rocks, tired and sometimes frustrated but always determined.“You never quit anything,” he said.

That outlook carried him through a devastating year when phylloxera destroyed the vineyard he had planted only a decade before.

“I had to replant the entire vineyard. The rootstock had failed,” MacLeod said. “I’ve never recovered fully, financially, from having to replant the vineyard twice.”

Despite those challenges - or maybe because of them - the rewards are plentiful. The views from atop his ranch, especially in the morning light, “are so gorgeous,” MacLeod said. “It’s just incredible, so staggeringly beautiful.”

The terroir and the dedication of many allowed MacLeod the great satisfaction of seeing his savignon blanc named 2013 Governor’s Selection, the top wine in the Stanford Wine Collection, a Stanford University competition and fundraiser.

He is indebted to many, he said, and devotes much of his book to thanking those who have helped in ways large and small.

He and a college friend returned their good fortune in life by paying the high school tuition and college expenses for all four daughters of MacLeod’s former vineyard foreman in Mexico.

Each woman is now a successful professional, one with a son named in honor of MacLeod.

All things are interwoven, MacLeod believes, from the many artifacts family members have found on the ranch to the cool ocean breeze that rolls in daily to keep his vines “happy,” just as Bob Kunde once suggested.

His memoir is one of “an incredible amount of love and affection” for his family, the land and those who’ve made contributions along the journey.

“The story starts about our ranch,” MacLeod said, “but it ends up as a metaphor for our lives.”

“Journey to Harvest” is available at the Kenwood Press, 8910 Highway 12, Kenwood, or online at macleodfamilyvineyard.com or at MagCloud.com/browse/issue/804954.

To watch Conner Jay’s video of the harvest at MacLeod Family Vineyard, visit youtube.com/watch?v=em42fXWuZnY.