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ANKENY VINEYARDS COLLECTION

Interview

This interview is the Joe Olexa from Ankeny Vineyards and Winery. He first talks about how he came to his property, what it was like growing the grapes and making the wine and then about the future of the Oregon wine industry.

This interview was conducted at the Ankeny Vineyards and Winery on August 17, 2015.

Interview photos

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After a career working in government policy and public relations, John Platt needed something else to focus his time on. He and his wife Elizabeth had friends in the Helvetia area, so they purchased their first 40 acres of agricultural land there in 1980. After a visit from an extension officer in 1982, John and Elizabeth were advised to plant grapes. What would you do if you knew you wanted to be a geologist when you were 10 years old? (Who even knows what a geologist is when they’re 10 years old?) Kevin Pogue never wavered from his desire to understand the world through its natural formations, and followed the path from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky to graduate school at Idaho State and then a PhD program at Oregon State, finally ending up as a longtime faculty member at Whitman College. Tim and Kathy O’Leary met when they lived in the same dormitory at Stanford, and farming wine grapes was the furthest thing from their minds. After graduation, Kathy worked on the practical side of industrial engineering, traveling around the world working on specific for companies of all types. Tim went to law school and worked in corporate law for Hewlett-Packard and a number of other tech companies. Brandon Hasart endeavored to learn more about vineyards and vineyard work as a way to make him more well-rounded on his way to being a winemaker. Soon he discovered that the work fit his personality and work style even better than winemaking, and he found himself on the path toward his current position as vineyard manager at Lingua Franca. Joe Ferris’s relationship with wine has been a bit of a slow burn. What began as an attempt to look cool and refined to impress a girl - now his wife - became an interest in the hands-on application of science that would eventually become his full time career. Jim Maresh was born into the Oregon wine industry and never left. Growing up on his grandparents’ famous vineyard in Dundee, he worked with vines from a young age and made his first wines as a middle-schooler.
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