Neil & Sue Shay
Roundabout Thanks…
Updated: Nov 20, 2021

It’s the season for giving thanks, and on our end, it turned out to happen via a somewhat peculiar and roundabout way: this fall we had to do a significant plumbing repair, a long section of our main water supply line was starting to develop leaks, and we had to expose about forty or more feet of pipe. To get the repair done, we had to rip out a fair amount of sheetrock in our main tasting room and a large closet to allow the plumbers to get at the pipe and do their thing. We had been using that closet for our own personal wine collection, and we had to remove ALL the bottles (several hundred, at least) and remove several wine racks from the wall to get at the sheetrock. For quite a while, we had to work around wine boxes and wine racks in the middle of our main tasting room area, but finally, this past week, the repair was completed, and we got our chance to repair the wallboard, reinstall the wine racks, and then unpack our wine out of the boxes and get them back into the racks.

This chore gave us a chance to revisit our wine path or wine story since we started home winemaking some twenty years ago. The dusting off and reorganizing of our collection allowed us to rediscover bottles all the way back to our very first amateur wines, from the 2004 vintage (this was Cabernet Franc, by the way), to Oregon Pinots and Chasselas in 2010 and 2011, our first two years in Oregon.

Then it was on to our first Bluebird Hill wines, the Pinots, starting in 2014, and the whites, with Chardonnay and White Wine Blend from 2015, and then our ‘Duology’ and ‘Trilogy’ white wine blends from 2016. Then on to the 2017’s and 2018’s and the rest of our current releases. It was fun thing to look through all these bottles, and then connect each varietal, each vintage to the events and people we talked wine and drank wine with!