Roots

The Lost Holes

There was much work to be done if the Gould family was going to be ready to plant the grapes in the spring.

On Christmas day of 2007—“one of the coldest days of the year,” recalls Mike—he and a friend finished digging the trench for a water line from the well to the hill where the vines would be planted.

“I remember thinking as I drove home that evening, cold, tired, and timid on icy roads, that I better grow something on the side of that hill or my wife, Marnie, was going to be a tad upset.”

Later that winter, Mike set to work digging the holes to plant the vines. This was no easy task, however, due to the hard, rocky, compressed ground that had never been disturbed by a shovel, much less planted. Using a steel auger attached to his Bobcat, Mike drilled and drilled some more, the winter wind whipping the dry, dusty soil in his face. He had to replace the cutting teeth of the auger twice throughout the process.

“It seemed that with each hole came more rocks. The place was just not looking much like any vineyard I had seen.”

To get rid of the rocks he had unearthed, Mike used a landscape rake attached to the Bobcat. It was a dirty, loud, and tedious process, but one that brought him closer to his vineyard with the amount of dirt he swallowed and inhaled: “I guess you could say I am now part of my terroir,” the soil and environment that creates the grape.

With the rocks gone, the hill started to look like it had potential to become a vineyard. The only problem was that the rock rake did more than get rid of the rocks—all 600 holes were filled in with dirt and had to be dug again.

“I felt like I was living the struggle of Sisyphus who had been condemned by the gods to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again,” recalls Mike. “I had entered the absurd world of Albert Camus.”

After relating this story to a friend from Belgium who had a fine laugh at the whole ordeal, the friend suggested they name the vineyard “Les Trous Perdus,” French for “The Lost Holes.” Though the vineyard remains named after the country road that leads to it, Mike appreciated the suggestion:

“I don’t imagine that I had ever thought it was possible that a hole could go missing up until that spring, but I know now that they can, will, and do! As Camus proposed, you need to revolt against the absurdity of ‘lost holes’ in life and imagine happiness.”

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