PAUL WELLMAN
This time, you can quit.
WE CAN HELP. Smoking Cessation Program January 14 – 30, 2014 5:30 – 7:00 pm Seven classes at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital will help you on the road to a healthier, smoke-free life. Suggested donation: $20. Free nicotine replacement therapy is provided to qualifying participants. Registration required. Call toll-free 1-855-CHS-WELL (1-855-247-9355).
Cottage is a not-for-profit organization providing medical excellence close to home. This Smoking Cessation Program is supported by Cottage Health System and the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department’s Tobacco Prevention Settlement Program.
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HARVEST RESEARCH: During a visit to Catalina this past August, Rusack winemaker Steve Gerbac grabbed a few grapes for testing, just one of the many steps to ensure the quality of the resulting wines. “Over the long run,” explained Geoff Rusack, “we want these grapes and this wine to be nothing short of world-class.”
being a full-bodied wine, fermented to dryness, with a higher alcohol content — qualities sought after in many of today’s top zinfandels.” With lawsuits, tragedies, and money troubles starting to affect the Caire family, the winery stopped producing in 1918, but the grapes kept growing into Prohibition, with fruit sold mostly to home winemakers until the Great Depression wiped out the project for good in 1932. Down on Catalina, chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. cashed in on the Banning brothers’ failed tourist mecca dreams by purchasing a large chunk of the island in 1919, and he set about enlivening Avalon with a bigger hotel and casino, improving the infrastructure, enhancing landscaping, and increasing transportation from the mainland. He also established a quarry and tile-making company that produced popular pottery, built El Rancho Escondido into a premier Arabian-horse-raising ranch, and brought the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which he also owned, to practice on the island every spring. Upon Wrigley’s death at age 70 in 1932, his son, Philip, took over administration of the island and, in 1972, created the Catalina Island Conservancy, thereby donating 88 percent of the land to be preserved as open space into perpetuity. At that time (though living primarily in Chicago with her father, William Wrigley III, and family), Alison Wrigley would visit the island most summers, and decided to attend Stanford for college. She never left California, eventually working for Disney. On a blind date in 1983, she met Geoff Rusack, the son of a Los Angeles Episcopalian bishop, who had returned to Southern California for law school at Pepperdine, having graduated first from Maine’s Bowdoin College. On their second date, while riding horses around Catalina, they discussed one day starting an island winery, and the dream that would one day reconnect the sister islands was set in motion.
Planting Problems, Harvesting Hell
Married with one kid and another on the way in 1992, the Rusacks started looking for a bigger house outside of Los Angeles and discovered Ballard Canyon Winery for sale. Though founded by dentist Gene Hallock in 1974 and warmly remembered by many for its annual grape-stomping parties, the 48-acre property was in “horrendous” shape, said Geoff, but they were
intrigued.“It was before it was a chic thing to buy wineries,” said Alison, so the price was right.“We thought we’d run the winery on the side and keep our full-time jobs. We had no idea what we were getting into.” With Alison working the books, Geoff got a crash course in grape growing, learning how to drive a tractor from regional pioneer Louis Lucas, and winemaking, with Richard Longoria leaving helpful tips on Post-it notes around the property. They replanted 17 acres on the vineyard’s “sweet spots,” said Geoff, and by 1995, the Rusack label — which features an old Catalina tile design — was on the market. But they kept returning to the idea of planting grapes around El Rancho Escondido, which was still owned privately by Alison’s family; Geoff ’s drive was only empowered when he read Thomas Pinney’s book The Wine of Santa Cruz Island, published in 1994 by the Santa Cruz Island Foundation. Meanwhile on Santa Cruz, The Nature Conservancy, which has owned the vast majority of the island since 1978, had its own problem: Many influential donors wanted the organization to bring the historic vineyard back to life, but it had neither the resources nor mission statement to do so. With rumors that the Rusacks were considering a vineyard on Catalina and wanted to look at Santa Cruz’s remnant vines — which had been identified years before by ranch manager Peter Schuyler and then found again by a subsequent manager David Dewey — Lotus Vermeer, who supervised the island for The Nature Conservancy at the time, was relieved. “This could be a very unique win-win situation where we can revise the history of winemaking and the old varietals on the Channel Islands and have somebody do it properly,” she told me during a trip to the island in 2012. So Geoff and his sons Austin and Parker (their third son, Hunter, was away at college), climbed the island’s willow tree, took clippings, had them analyzed (one plant was the notoriously nasty mission grape variety), and propagated the zinfandel. In March 2007, after testing the climactic conditions and finding them much like the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, they started planting the zin as well as pinot noir and chardonnay into a vineyard at El Rancho Escondido. Wine grape expert Larry Finkle, who works with Coastal Vineyard Care, said that the biggest initial challenge was the salty soils, which forced them to create a “complex system of drains and berms” that has “worked