Community - Journal Entry number 1 - 2026

To the Shumaker Vineyards family,

Community. This is what I am truly trying to build. Making wine is just a vehicle for bringing us all together. Sure, creating those beautiful drops of God‘s nectar is an amazing blessing, but wine has never been solely about the beverage. Bringing humans together around a cup of wine has been present for millennia. Wine has been consumed at untold numbers of gatherings to celebrate, share grief, appreciate art and music, fulfill our civic duty, bond with family, rejoice with friends, witness history and toast the good life. I feel so blessed to play an integral role in continuing this tradition. To that end, I would like to use this journal to share more of my personal journey with you, the Shumaker Vineyards family. My hope is that through this community, we can get to know each other and ourselves better. We can make new friends and find space for shared experiences. Please use the comment section below each journal entry. To share your thoughts with me and the rest of the ShuVin community. It is truly an honor to live this life with all of you.

Cheers, Doug.

Journal entry number 1 of 2026.

My plan for each journal entry is to share a little bit about myself and my personal journey, both in life and in wine. I will also share a little bit about what is going on in the vineyard and winery itself. I hope you enjoy this. Please reach out with any questions or suggestions for building this community. Or, to just share a personal story, quip, observation, or funny anecdote. There are no rules, except be kind and grateful.

First, a little bit about myself. I am a native Oregonian. Like many children born in the Portland area in the late 1960s, I took my first breath at Emmanuel Hospital. My parents were a couple of hippies who were high school sweethearts at Lake Oswego High School, back when it was just a cow town outside Portland. Not, the bougie suburb it is today. They bought a small bungalow in Gresham for $10,000, after getting married in 1964. Their first child, me, was born in 1968, followed two years later by my brother, Dan. It didn’t take long for my parents to pursue their dream of a rural lifestyle. After a five-year stint on a 5-acre forested lot near Scholls, they moved to an old homestead in the foothills of the coast range outside Banks when they responded to a real estate ad promising 40 acres and a barn. It was no mistake that the 100 year-old salt box style house was not mentioned in the ad. Undeterred, they added on 12 feet to the house and raised their two boys, forever ingraining a sense of land stewardship and a farmhand work ethic, through countless hours of shoveling sheep shit. If only I could go back and tell my teenage self that those hours would build character. Who knew?!?

My first real memory of the wine community was a hippie picnic sponsored by the young, pioneering Ponzi family who established one of the first vineyards and wineries in Oregon in the early 1970s, near our home in Scholls. I was probably five. It would be a couple of decades later, and untold moments of under-age beer drinking, before I would really experience my first taste of good wine. However, the idea of a community of people gathered around good food and good drink, would be indelibly imprinted on my soul. It’s a full circle moment, that I now have the privilege of hosting all of you at my home in the same beautiful spirit. I have, literally, grown-up with the wine industry in Oregon. What an honor! Won’t you please come on this journey with me.

So, what’s happening in the vineyard? Well, winter is considered the “dormant period”. Like a hibernating bear, the vines have settled into a quiet slumber. They have pulled back all of their food and nutrients from the shoots and leaves of the recent vintage and stored them in the trunk and roots. While the vines are quiet for the moment, the winery remains busy. Since harvest, fermentation from this vintages juice, has essentially completed. Now, each wine is experiencing its own amount of aging and maturation, depending on the varietal (white, red or pink) and style (still or sparkling). We have barrel tasted to determine if any specific intervention might be needed to ensure quality. We are prepping for our first round of bottling in the next month. This will include bottling of our white wines and rosé. Our ever popular sparkling Pinot Gris, the Blanc de Blancs, will head off to the bottler to be carbonated and capped. This year, in addition to our estate still Pinot Gris, we have purchased fruit to make a Chardonnay and a Sauvignon Blanc. We are so excited to offer some additional white wines this year. And, in about a year from now, we will also bottle a new red wine, a delectable Willamette Valley, Oregon, Cabernet Franc. Sorry, but you will have to be patient while it benefits from another year or so of aging in barrel. However, it will definitely be worth the wait!

Tuesday, I will be meeting with our venerable winemakers, Bree and Chad Stock, to trial different blends of our 2024 estate Pinot Noir. I will describe this process in the results in next weeks journal. I feel so incredibly lucky to have two of the best palates in the world helping me determine the best approach to creating the perfect bottles for you.

Finally, an update on the tasting room! The walls have been painted, the new oak floors are nearly installed, a new entry door will be in place soon, furniture has been purchased, dried flower arrangements completed (thanks to our good friend, Amy Caine). I cannot tell you how incredibly excited I am to share this space with you. This will be the main gathering place for our community. In addition to regular hours for wine tasting with friends, we are planning an amazing array of gatherings. Ideas in the works include intimate concerts, local artist exhibitions, food events (including food trucks, cooking classes, etc.), “vinyl nights” where you can bring and share your favorite vinyl records, a book and wine club, a lending library of your favorite books, support of local charities, and on and on. We would love any ideas you, our community, have as well. Please send me a text, email, DM on Instagram or Facebook or leave comments below. This is your community! We want you to be a part of how we all get together and support and celebrate each other. This is one way we look to live the Good Life.

Until next week.

As always.

Cheers,

Doug