Jen and Joe join the Band and we begin to get serious

Chapter 4: Jen and Joe join the Band and we begin to get serious…

Captain America: Little by little, our wives were coming around. I guess they figured that if Dave and I had to have an obsession, this at least appeared to be a healthy one. As we had lost one partner in crime, Dave suggested that he saw in Jen’s boyfriend, Joe, a little of the same mania that we possessed. Before long, Jen and Joe joined us. It was about this time that Dave suggested that Aquila Verde sounds like an aftershave and that, since our little vineyard in Dave’s yard was on Auburn Road, we should change the name to Auburn Road Vineyards. I thought it sounded cool and so we went with it.

Then, in the winter of 2002, my dad, Luigi, passed away suddenly. It was pretty awful as I guess it always is when you lose a parent. He came from immigrant parents and became a CPA and made himself out of pretty much nothing. He worked hard, long hours in a corporate world more or less the same as the one Dave and I were now in. He died too young and there is not too much dispute that the work, the stress and the lifestyle that it created pretty much killed him. I think about him a lot when I’m on the farm. He had been living in the city the last few years of his life, but he always talked about buying a house with a few acres of land in Jersey. I told him he was nuts, why would he want that headache? His response was that he wanted to be able to pee on the grass. I tried to get the words “voglio piciare nel erba” (Italian for “I want to pee in the grass”) placed on our first wine label but the TTB wouldn’t let us. I’m not sure my dad would have ever done what we have done here. But I know he’d love this place.

Anyhow, it turned out that my dad left me a little money. I remember talking with Dave about whether we could really make a go of this, because if we thought we could, we could take what my dad left me and start looking for land to grow grapes on. Next thing we knew we were looking for land.