Cattrall Vineyard

Our farm was established in 1916 by John Celestin Sartore. An immigrant in early childhood from Alpine Italy, John was raised primarily in Astoria, Oregon. After saving his earnings from work in the sawmills as a young man, he bought 23 acres of uncleared Eola hillside, intending to make his living as a farmer. He was the first year-round settler on the hill, and after spending much of his early years pulling boulders and trees from the soil, he eked out a modest living raising strawberries, dairy cows, chickens, and pigs. 

Uncle John was a bachelor, though his mother Philomene lived and worked alongside him for several decades until her death in 1952, and by the early 1970s he realized he wouldn't live forever. The next generation of his sister's family had already passed away, and his sister's grandchildren, Bill and Tom Cattrall, were both living abroad.  He made an arrangement with his neighbor Dennis Brutke--Dennis would start buying the farm, but John could live out his days there. John died in 1971. Bill returned from his Army post in Northern Italy just a few months later, with a newfound passion for wine and a suspicion that because both the Army base in Consalve and his home in Oregon straddled the 45th parallel, wine grapes might be a viable new crop for the old family farm. 

Bill talked Dennis out of the farm and moved in March 1972. He got cuttings from David Adelsheim and had them growing in the garden before the house ever had hot water.  Friends joined in the farming effort, and during the 1970s the farm produced a little bit of everything from organic strawberries to a bumper crop of zucchini.  Compared to zucchini, the challenge of growing wine grapes in a nascent winegrowing region and the tantalizing proscpect of market viability ensured that the vineyard continually expanded. When Tom returned to the hill and took over the old Davis berry farm down the road, the brothers planted three acres of grapes there, in 1983.

In 1982, Bill and Carol married.  In 1985 and 1987,  Julia and Laura were born, and by the early nineties, both were undermotivated, loafing  young viticulturalists. On a particularly trying day training  grade school age leaf pullers, Bill promised a rare and coveted Dairy Queen Banana Split for the first kid to find a bird's nest among the leaves. A  few years of afternoon ice creams later, the Cattrall sistersyears of afternoon ice creams later, the Cattrall sisters were happily integrated into the rhythm of working the vines.  Today, the Cattrall brothers and sisters tend the vineyard together.