Bottled up dreams

Microsoft alum adopts grape-growing mindset in ‘retirement’

PHOTO COURTESY Microsoft Alumni Network Photo | Cathy Cheney

While working for Microsoft in Europe, Ernie Pink gained an appreciation for Pinot Noir. When he retired, he and his partner Dena Drews set about creating award-winning blends in the Willamette Valley.

By Brad Broberg

Ernie Pink was adamant.

“I want you to write this down,” the former Microsoft executive said by telephone from his Oregon winery.  “We’re living the dream so you don’t have to.”

Ernie and his partner, Dena Drews, are co-founders of the Amalie Robert Estate Winery in the Willamette Valley.

Converted from a former cherry orchard at the end of a gravel road outside the small town of Dallas, Oregon, the winery and surrounding vineyard is an enviable place to live and a gratifying way to make a living. Close your eyes and you can’t help but dream of being a winemaker yourself.

But you can do more than dream. You can sign up for a flogging.

Wait! What?

A flogging is what happens when you subscribe to the Amalie Robert Estate Farming Blog – a.k.a. the Flog. Here’s the pitch from the winery’s website.

“By subscribing, you will receive regular FLOGGINGS throughout the growing season. The FLOGGING will begin with the Spring Cellar Report in April. FLOGGINGS will continue each month and detail how the vintage is shaping up. You may also be FLOGGED directly after the big Cluster Pluck with the yearly Harvest After Action Report. Subscribe now and let the FLOGGINGS begin!”

By now you might wonder if you can take any of this seriously.

You can. And you should. 

Ernie and Dena have been growing top shelf grapes and making top shelf wine ever since they planted their first vines in 2000 and released their first wines in 2004.

A wise guy might say it’s been downhill ever since because a leading reviewer of pinot noirs gave one of their 2004 wines his highest score right out of the chute.

But the truth is that Ernie and Dena set a standard they continue to meet as high scores keep rolling in. Wine and Spirits Magazine named Amelie Robert Estate Winery of the Year in 2011. 

The couple now tend 35 acres of grapes and produce more than 3,000 cases of wine a year. They sell mainly to restaurants but also ship directly to consumers.

Not bad for two people without an ounce of experience in farming or winemaking. But what they lacked in experience they made up for in tenacity — a trait Ernie honed during his days at Microsoft.

“It’s like digging into any project at Microsoft. Here. Go figure this out,” he said.

Ernie worked at Microsoft from 1991 to 1999. He led the consolidation of the company’s European licensing offices to a central location in Dublin. That’s where he met Dena, a consultant who helped Ernie develop a better system for collecting payments from licensees.

That’s also when the wine bug bit. Hard.

“In Europe, most business gets done at night,” Ernie explained. And it gets done usually at dinner. And dinner and wine are one and the same. It’s just ingrained in the culture.

Although he was no connoisseur, most of the people he wined and dined with were savvy oenophiles who introduced him to bottle after bottle of great wine — most notably pinot noirs from the Burgundy region.

“At the time I had no idea we were going to get into this, but I was paying attention because you’re drinking some really nice wine,” Ernie said.

Fast forward to 1999. He had retired from Microsoft while Dena was still working as a consultant. They discovered the blossoming food and wine scene in the Willamette Valley during weekend getaways.

They came, they saw, they made friends and before you know it they were shopping for land to plant a vineyard and build a winery with an eye on producing the style of pinot noirs they learned to love in Europe.

They knew they had come to the right place because the Willamette Valley produces the country’s finest pinot noirs, but they still needed to find a site with just the right slope and soil.

Their quest led them to a cherry orchard that was for sale by a guy named Bob. Ernie told him, “Bob, I got here too late. You’ve got your cherry orchard on top of my vineyard.” Then, he wrote Bob a check.

Ernie and Dena harvested one last crop of cherries and in 2000 began the arduous process of planting a vineyard.  Four years and a bazillion blisters later, Amalie Robert Estate Winery was an instant success.

“I worked really hard at Microsoft, and I worked a lot of hours (but when) you become a farmer, you realize farmers work REALLY hard and you don’t know how hard they work until you try to be one,” Ernie said.

“The first few years you’re developing the property,” he explained. “Getting the trees cleared off. Pounding posts and running wire. Trying to get the little plants to live. In the third year you might get some grapes and in the fourth year you might be in production.”

Other than hiring crews to prune and harvest, Ernie does all the farm work himself. The winemaking is a shared responsibility with Ernie and Dena each producing their own blends.

Neighboring winemakers admire how Ernie and Dena approached the challenge of breaking into the wine industry as total newbies.

“Ernie has an experimental mindset,” said Steve Doerner at Cristom Vineyards. “He was not afraid to try stuff that is not the norm. He was willing to learn things on his own. He wasn’t just copying someone else.”

As they look forward to another, ahem, cluster pluck, Ernie and Dena savor being hands-on winemakers and don’t want to grow past the point where that’s possible.

“Our top end is about 5,000 cases. If you get too much bigger than that ... you end up taking your eye off the ball. So, at 5,000 cases I can (control) everything that happens. It’s me and the guy in the mirror if something goes wrong,” he said.

“Everything is about respecting the land and making the wine better,” Ernie explained. “We’re not about volume. We’re not about discounting. We’re not about any of those things.  What we’re about is making the best wine on the planet because for now anyway, this is the only planet that grows wine.”