You may be wondering, and you wouldn’t be the only one, how the name Vixen came about. The idea came to me as a result of a bedtime story many years ago: My brother and I always enjoyed Aesop’s Fables, and my favorite fable was the story of the Fox and the Grapes. I’m sure you recall the one: Fox’s search for food takes her to a vineyard, where the unreachable grapes hang from the vines. On her journey to claim these grapes, wily Fox meets a foolish donkey, a wise boar, a vain leopard and a shrewd lion. With each meeting, Fox gains wisdom, until at the end of the day Fox devises a plan to harvest the ripe fruit.

The moral of the story is “with time comes wisdom”. I suppose I admired that fox as a child, and the tale stuck with me all these years. It just so happens that a female fox is called a vixen, and so both this name and this story seemed appropriate.

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My first adventures in winemaking began in 2001,when a family friend and backyard grape grower offered to give me Syrah fruit from his third-leaf vines (the equivalent of your first-born child). Since the venture would cost me nothing but time, I accepted his offer. This same year I took both viticulture and enology classes at a local college, and worked more closely with my father, winemaker Daniel Gehrs, in the cellar during harvest. I only intended for this to be an experiment, or a hobby at best. I was encouraged by the success of my first vintage and by my family and friends to continue.

As I enter my 7th harvest in 2007, I feel as if this is where I belong. I refer back to the moral of the story for the Fox and the Grapes, “with time comes wisdom”. I’ll raise my glass to that!