Don and Carol McClure: Youthful vines, youthful attitudes

NEWBERG, Oregon - For Don and Carol McClure, retirement here is turning out to be what they wanted - and nothing at all like they expected.

Don, who ended a long career as a pathologist at the end of 2005, and Carol, a registered nurse, are now winemakers.

At a time when many people seek a life of relaxation and ease, Don and Carol have taken on a huge financial and personal challenge with a steep learning curve.

"I'd do it again in a heartbeat," says Don, 64, who grew up in Seattle but spent most of his working life, 30 years, in Denver. "When I envisioned this, I thought: What a great way to spend retirement."

McClure Vineyards

About 30 miles and an hour's drive southwest of Portland, their home is nestled in beautiful, sparsely settled rolling hills. Drive up N.E. Lewis Rogers Lane and you'll have to look closely for evidence of a wine-making operation. What you'll see is a simple sign at the end of their driveway announcing the Ayres Vineyard and Winery.

On two weekends every year (Memorial Day and Thanksgiving), the winery is open to the public, as are many other small wineries in Northwest Oregon.

Visitors who come seeking pinot noir, this region's specialty, will find it. But they won't find a pretentious chateau. As they enter the long driveway and pass a neat house and farming implements on the left, they'll come to a second house that could fit easily in any modern suburb.

Since 2002, this is home to the McClures and their winery. It's not an ordinary house. An observant visitor may notice a stain in the concrete pad in front of what looks like a garage door at the front of the house. That's where tons of grapes are crushed once a year.

The door itself leads to a 2,100-square-foot cellar that contains the tasting room, aging barrels, an inventory of bottled wine and various equipment and machinery.

All this is located on a tract of 38 acres that was once a filbert orchard. The McClures turned that land into a vineyard in 2000, and now 10 of those acres are planted in grape vines, mostly pinot noir. Another 15 acres are plantable, Don says.

How did all this happen?

Don and Carol, who have been Merriman clients since 1999, would often go to medical conferences in the San Francisco Bay area, then stay for a few more days at bed-and-breakfast places in the Napa Valley. Walking among the vineyards was a welcome counterpoint to pathology lectures.

Don read a book some years ago by an author who said retirees who simply stopped were making a big mistake. Instead, he urged retirees to figure out something they wanted to DO with their lives.

"We always wanted to eventually move back to the Pacific Northwest," said Carol. "We wanted to retire somewhere with pleasant surroundings and a view."

"It had to be something that would keep us busy and challenged," Don added. "I am still in the steep part of the learning curve."

Ayres Vineyard and Winery fills that bill. The name came from the family of Brad McLeroy, Don and Carol's son-in-law and next-door neighbor and Ayres' fulltime winemaker.

Brad is an owner, too, and the McClures expect that someday he will take over the operation. In the meantime they get to live next door to their daughter, Kathleen, and their granddaughter, Maya, 2.

Brad is well-suited to help Don and Carol navigate the learning curve. After obtaining a marketing degree from the University of Colorado, Brad worked in his father's wine store in Kansas City, then started his own. He eventually became cellarmaster at Domaine Drouhin Oregon, a pinot noir winery about five miles away from Ayres. In 2005, he left that job to devote all his time to the current venture.

McClure Outdoors

The all-in-the-family touch is especially pleasing to Don and Carol, who could otherwise legitimately feel isolated out here in the hills after decades of big-city living. (Carol grew up in San Francisco and later Amador County, which is between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite and home to more than two dozen wineries.)

The McClure's two sons live in Seattle. Doug owns the Zeek's pizza restaurant chain; his brother, Greg, is an executive there.

Isolation apparently is no problem. "We have friends who love to come volunteer to help us," Carol said, in what Don describes as "a winemaker's fantasy camp" that pays the volunteers in wine, not cash. "A lot of my friends are retired and they come out here for something to do," he said.

"This is a little like raising children," Don said. "There's a lot more to it than I ever would have thought. But the reward is great. It's a creative endeavor."

Carol: "This is a totally different lifestyle than we ever lived before. You learn more about yourself and it makes you grow. It's nothing like anything I ever thought it would be.

"So many retired people drift around and seem to want nothing more than an easy lifestyle," she said. "This is a lot of work and I love it. It's a fun, exciting adventure. People like coming here because we are a small boutique winery and it's personal."

Don has noticed something else remarkable for him. After decades of diagnosing diseases, often knowing his verdict would amount to a death sentence for a patient he might never meet, he's now growing plants, creating wine - in a way creating life itself. He loves this change, which energizes him every day.

However, it would be a mistake to think this couple's life is dominated by entertaining friends, sipping pinot noir and gazing over their acreage.

"As romantic as wine making may seem, we are basically farmers," who depend heavily on the weather every year, Don said.

Not just farmers, but farmers who have made a huge capital investment. The McClures paid an extra $130,000 for the wine-making part of their home. Aside from the cost of the land, add $15,000 to $20,000 per acre for initial planting and you can see this could be an expensive hobby.

Especially when the vines spend their first three years in the ground without producing any grapes. Then there's maintenance, which can cost $1,000 per ton per year to prune and take care of the vines. At harvest time, the fruit could be sold for $1,200 to $6,000 per ton, depending on a complex matrix of conditions including economics, weather, agriculture and pure supply-and-demand.

When they were contemplating becoming winemakers, Don added an important condition to the whole venture. In addition to keeping them active, getting them to the Northwest and giving them a challenge, "It had to be profitable, too," he said.

They are not there yet.

Don's seat-of-the-pants analysis tells him they must make 2,000 cases of wine to break even and make a small profit. Their first year of production yielded 300 cases, which increased to 1,300 in 2005. Don thinks they'll reach 2,000 in 2006 or 2007.

There's another problem: Their vineyard can't produce enough grapes. In 2005, the McClures had to buy fruit grown elsewhere to supplement the approximately 15 tons from their own land. This obviously makes the whole business more complex and gives Don and Carol an incentive to bring more of their own land into production.

There's another reason to move toward producing their wines exclusively with their own grapes: That's the opportunity to take advantage of a special appellation or AVA, for American Viticultural Area. Think of an AVA as a legal description of a wine's geographical pedigree that recognizes the distinct soil features and climate where the grapes were grown.

Ayres Vineyard is one of about 10 wineries in the "Ribbon Ridge" AVA, an area only about 12 miles across and named for an old school. The McClures can't use "Ribbon Ridge" on their bottles until at least 85 percent of the grapes are grown in that specific area.

Now, they use the larger "Willamette Valley" AVA on their labels. Will they be able to command a premium price for their wines by using the Ribbon Ridge designation?

Nobody knows for sure, but many wineries try hard to develop an AVA as a tag of quality. It makes sense in a way, because grape quality is heavily dependent on the soils and microclimates of where those grapes are grown.

Pinot noir is Oregon's premier grape, partly because the state's western region has temperature ranges that seem just about right for it. Pinot thrives where it can ripen slowly, and Napa temperatures are typically too hot for that.

That means Oregon wineries don't face head-to-head competition with the well-known and well-financed California industry. And it means Don and Carol get to spend their lives producing, promoting and enjoying a wine they have loved for some time.

Ayres produces two wines. One called Willamette Valley is made from their own grapes mixed with older fruit grown near Salem. The other is called Pioneer, a very limited bottling made exclusively from Ayres fruit. The next bottling will be designated with the Ribbon Ridge AVA.

The name Pioneer honors Don's family heritage. His great-grandfather came to the Willamette Valley in 1852 on the Oregon Trail at the age of 23. He wanted to be a farmer but wound up instead with a hardware store in Eugene.

Don has finally closed the circle to become that farmer. And he's adopting the long-term mentality of agriculture, thinking about how crops will develop over years and decades.

"I want to drink old-vine pinot noir from vines on my property that are 20 years old," he said. "So I am planning to stick around for awhile."