Carrying the Torch - Two Decades of TMW
The old “Coming Soon” sign that stood on the corner of Cheyne and Highland
Don’t know what’s weirder to hear/say: “Two thousand twenty-two” or “20th anniversary of Two Mountain Winery.” Both communicate that we are not, despite what we believe in our minds, twenty-somethings living in the early 2000s anymore. That, and griping about having to scan a QR code for a menu with the same device with which we’re simultaneously checking our investment portfolios. Guess we really are growing up, whatever that means.
Twenty years. Where has the time gone?!?
When our Uncle Ron (Schmidt) decided to add vines to the family farm back in 2000, we were just a couple of cargo short-clad kids slowly making our way to the next chapter of our lives. Matt was fresh out of Montana State and Patrick wasn’t even of (legal) drinking age at the University of Washington. By the time the winery was in production in 2002, Matt was making the wine (with a lot of love and support from Washington wine pioneers such as Stan Clark, Wade Wolfe and Paul Portteus) and Pat continued to spend summers on the farm driving tractor. We thought we were just passing time until our next chapter. Little did we know, we were already writing it.
Matt and Uncle Ron at a tasting “back in the day”
We don’t talk a lot about how we got to where we are because it seems like we’ve always been here. We spent our summers driving tractor/forklift/bin truck for Schmidt Orchards, so it wasn’t a leap to find ourselves back on the farm after college. As Ron followed his burning desire to grow grapes and make wine, we were right there along for the ride. The wine industry, and specifically that of Washington, was so new, so novel. Heck, a lot of people didn’t even know Washington HAD a wine industry.
It was a wake-up call when we lost Ron unexpectedly in 2006. He had been managing the family farm since our grandparents (Phil and Phyllis Schmidt) retired. His passing thrust us into making some tough decisions for both ourselves as well as the family business. The winery had been Ron’s dream, and while we were having fun with it, was it really the path we wanted to follow?
Fast forward to 2022: guess so!
If you ask either one of us, the answer was obvious. We’d been having the literal time of our lives planting grapes and making wine. We weren’t yet ready to walk away. That, combined with our desire to continue the legacy of our family (the guilt of ending the Copeland/Schmidt/Rawn farming “dynasty” ;P weighing very lightly on our minds) gave us the motivation we needed to take the next step: tricking a bank into giving us what, in hindsight, was not enough money to buy the winery. In August 2006, those two cargo short-clad kids became the proud owners of Two Mountain Winery.
The Brothers Rawn circa 2008 with Stoli, Gus, and Rudy
So when we say this is a big year, we mean it. Not only have we managed to continue our family’s farming legacy, but we have been able to write our generation’s chapter of our family story. It’s an incredible feeling to be able to share a place we love so much with the world, one glass of wine at a time. Cheesy, but 100% true.
Coming to this milestone has granted us the opportunity to look at how far we have come. We are prideful of how far we have come but are even more pumped about where we are going. Do we know exactly where that is? We have ideas (most of them involve us ending up on a boat)...
Will this be the year Matt gets to Inbox Zero? *major eyeroll*
Will this be the year we finally have enough rosé to make it through summer? Fingers crossed!
Will we be busting our humps (the kids DEFINITELY don’t say this anymore) to make sure this year is the best one yet? You better believe it.
Ah, the hubris of youth, the intrigue of the unknown, the thrill of the challenge. If you’d have asked us twenty years ago where we’d be in 2022, odds are the answer would have been much different. Turns out, we’re right where we’re supposed to be.
All we can hope is that Uncle Ron and Grandpa Phil are looking down on us and smiling as they watch us on our own farming journey. Certainly they are getting a good laugh knowing we still get tractors stuck in the mud on the regular.